PAN TERRA

On Muslim Immigration In The EU

2012-01-29T09:56:00.001-08:00

Tyranosopher
January 27th, 2012.
Europe, per its many nations coming together in an union, is a place of debate, therein its strength: many ideas are proposed, the best ones mate together and produce better sorts of ideas.
As far as anti-Muslim racism is concerned, let's notice the following. More than a millennium ago, France silently incorporated an important Muslim population, without any coercion (we know this from genetic analysis). If the High Middle Ages could do it, so can we.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

la.výritý in reply to Tyranosopher
January 29th The damaging effects of Muslim immigration into the secular societies of Western Europe is caused by 'a millennium' of religious-ethical, cultural and scientifical stagnation of the immigrating Muslim culture (and its insistence to cling to it); while the host culture is-as-it-is exactly because it shook off, during and after the Age of Enlightenment, the yoke of a -religiously- too tight interpretation of the world.

A millennium ago it was the other way around: The Muslim world was culturally and scientifically more advanced than medieval Europe.

Personally, I think that a Muslim background is no hindrances to enter successfully a secular Western society . . . but the insistence to cling to the very narrow religious guidelines for social cohabitation, especially with another culture, makes the current Muslim culture more or less incompatible with the 'open-society-model' so commonly-received among Europeans.

This is why some social-scientific thinkers reflect upon the end of 'multicultural tolerance' after masses of Muslim immigrants sought economic refuge within European countries' political borders.

Tyranosopher in reply to la.výritý

Dear la.vyrity:
I understand what you say. I am myself a cultural supremacist, and an enemy of superstition. I am also from Africa. There is no contradiction; a lot of "Muslims" have left Africa (say), precisely to enjoy a secular republican state in Europe.

There should be not favor extended to Islam which is not extended to other superstitions, such as Judaism (say) and Muslim "law" should not be tolerated in the slightest.

The assertion that the Muslim world was more advanced a millenium ago is widespread, but not true. It is a legend created by very dishonest pseudo intellectuals.

For example the empire of the Franks tolerated Jews and Muslims... With equal rights. Catholics became Jews in droves: that was OK.

In the Iberian Caliphate next door, switching from Muslim to Christian, even for an ex-Christian, was the cause for a very painful execution.

Technologically, the Franks had superior steel by 721 CE (this allowed them to annihilate the army of the Arab Caliphate, in a war, 721-750 CE, which fell to the Iranians by 750 CE, as a result). Europeans also invented the first mechanical clocks (let alone plenty of new species of plants, including beans, and animals).

There is much more along these unconventional lines of wisdom on the site Patrice Ayme (Google!)

GOLDMAN DEMONIC POWER VERSUS GRAND DIVINE PLAN

2011-10-19T14:08:00.000-07:00

Economic performance is generally first measured by GDP, Gross Domestic Power. The gross power of domestics? Much too much of it is "financial", whatever that means.

GDP? Which GDP indeed? GDP as Goldman Demonic Power? Enough of that already!
The problem with the present GDP is that it is too dependent on the financial piracy part of it. It is a bit like saying that the bigger the one who is ravaged by metastatic cancer, the better, while most of her mass is a malignant tumor, and growing.

In truth we need a Grand Divine Plan. Why? Because our technology has what our ancestors would have viewed as divine powers. So we need to adapt our society, and, in particular, our decision making, to that.
To divine material powers have to correspond divine spiritual powers.

The essence of the crisis is that a few hidden secretive bankers are in charge of money creation, and, as they lay out of the reach of democracy, they lend to their co-conspirators. Throwing more public money at the problem of malignant GDP, through the banks, is throwing more gasoline into the roaring fire. While claiming disingenuously that, since it's liquidity, it should work.

Well not all liquids are the same, children! Money changes nature, according to what it is lent for. As demonstrated by the notion of money laundering: dirty money can be cleansed, and that is unlawful. Similarly, not all other ways to manipulate money ought to be lawful.

Fortunately, the Internet, by tapping the raw mental power of all of humankind will allow us to find solutions, a higher level of spirituality, of mental powers, which have escaped our leaders so far (supposing they care... against their own best interests...)
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Updates on politics: wealth to the rich, lies...

2011-09-07T12:09:00.000-07:00

Those who admire a parodic version of Reagan, such as Obama and the Tea Party are in power. They are the equivalent of dinosaurs, because what they are trying to do, was tried under the Roman empire: give ever more money to the rich. The largest piece of Obama stimulus was tax cuts, and those tax cuts, over Bush and Obama have gone first to the hyper rich. As I said, the Romans had tried this first.

Those Reaganosaurs do not understand who is supposed to lead a democratic country: that's the government, not the hyper rich. Nor do they understand who leads the economy: that's also the government.
Without the government, there is no direction, no comprehension, no intelligence. So here we are.
The Roman empire collapsed from stupidity unchained. And that stupidity had been preceded by a government taking all the wrong decisions.
Because inasmuch as Obama and his bipartisan partner, the Tea Party, may not like it, they are the government. By refusing to lead, and saying the hyper rich will, they have abdicated their responsibility, And cut off the head: so the economy was running around without one, and now it has stopped moving. Can Obama understand that? Can the Tea Party?
***

Bin Laden was recruited and trained to attack civilian objectives by the CIA (and Saudi intelligence, itself recruited by the CIA). Everything else, while not necessarily a lie, is at best secondary.

Another truth is that, since civilization exists, plutocracy has been fighting democracy. Qadhafi was a plutocrat (worth: 150 billion dollars). The first enemy of plutocracy is the truth.

Right now, democracy is losing in the West, as the bankers have captured the money creation system for themselves, and those who represent the People .

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Bailing Out Greece Means More Taxes For France & Germany

2011-08-10T14:22:00.000-07:00

Naked capitalism has a ridiculous article adopting the fancy fantasy that bailing out Greece, Portugal, Ireland does not augment taxes on Northern Europe, France, Germany, Netherlands, etc. Because it augments debt only, a stupid journalist based in Ireland claims.

According to this, paying all due respect, complete idiot, there is something as free money: just borrow it, become Greek, irish, American, whatever...

See what happens next, as you get downgraded into oblivion, with no more social services... Like in Cameron's kingdom, now complete with entire blocks burning. Do like the city of Half Moon Bay, next to Silicon Valley, and fire your police department: it's safe. Exilarating even.

The main argument therein is contradicted by facts, and basic logic. Totally.

According to decisions taken by Merkel and Sarkozy, which apparently did not reach the Ireland worthy of showing up in "naked capitalism", the French government is to lower deficit/GDP to less than 3% by 2013 (it's 5.4% now). Germany and the Netherlands are similarly committed.

To do so, the French government has announced that it will increase taxes, all over. So EU taxpayers do pay, and the author should listen to French TV; the declarations of the gov are loud and clear.

BTW, how could it be otherwise? Debt is just delayed spending.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Shamebook

2011-07-12T22:04:00.000-07:00

The valuation of \"Facebook\" is rumored to be 100 billion dollars. It has more to do with very well organized crime than anything else (Goldman sachs is one of the main sponsors, of "Facebook", and the valuation). The company makes nearly no profits and has 2,000 employees, worldwide. Some French journalists surprised CIA employees they personally knew, at Facebook headquarters.

This sort of companies make it big, thanks to the enormous interior American market. A French company had a Facebook like company, but because of the smaller French market, and the lack of market manipulations American VCs are connected with the government for, it made just enough to get its ideas stolen.

Such Silicon Valley companies do not have really state of the art technology. American planners confuse tech superiority and market size. Hence a dangerous illusion, because organized crime tricks do not lead to real tech superiority, as the USSR demonstrated.

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Health Greed USA, Health care, UK

2011-06-14T15:06:00.000-07:00

Americans do not realize how uncivilized their society increasingly looks from overseas. And worse is to come: HEALTH GREED instead of health care in the USA is only part of it. USA neoconservatives ask not whether Medicare saves money to society. They ask whether Medicare maximizes greed to their friends.

David Cameron, British PM, June 2011:

"Ask a Briton to describe “American-style” healthcare, and you’ll hear a catalog of horrors that include grossly expensive and unnecessary medical procedures and a privatized system that favors the rich. For a people accustomed to free healthcare for all, regardless of income, the fact that millions of their cousins across the Atlantic have no insurance and can’t afford decent treatment is a farce as well as a tragedy... We will not be selling off the NHS [National Health Service], we will not be moving towards an insurance scheme, we will not introduce an American-style private system...” insisted Prime Minister David Cameron to a group of healthcare workers in a nationally televised address."

Prime Minister David Cameron is, alike Sarkozy, Merkel and Berlusconi, a conservative. None of these leaders would dream to modify seriously their national health system with free basic coverage to all. The German universal health system originated with Chancellor Bismarck, more than 125 years ago.

So why is the USA heading the other way? Why is it devolving? because all civilization are threatened by plutocracy, and the later is a non linear phenomenon, as difficult to extirpate as metastic cancer. it comes to pervade the body politics.

In truth all too many of the people who are elected in the USA, run for office, only so that they will please the plutocrats, knowing full well that they will be rewarded, as the Clintons were rewarded.

We have got to the point, in the USA, where the political system selects particularly for the greedy unconscionable.

The French were very surprised and extremely shocked that the head of the IMF was treated worse than a wild and dangerous beast (beasts don't get chained). All this while he was presumed innocent (his gigantic young and muscular accuser, a dedicated Muslim, who has posed for racy pictures (!) risks only a "misdemeanor, if she invented the whole no-physical-injury "aggression"). Once the Europeans, and others, figure out that the present American plutocratic in its fully ravenous mode, their contempt will have adverse economic consequences for the USA. Banana republic, especially without bananas, do not look like a good place to invest anything whatsoever.
PA

Sex & Drug Legalization Unavoidable

2011-06-11T08:46:00.000-07:00

"Sex Crime Unit", New York. The Pride Of A Big Apple, or Just One More Snake in the Garden of the Beasts?

The "Sex Crime Unit" is famous for punishing the old, weak, overweight, sick, oxygen deprived, brainy head of the International Monetary Fund, the economist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, for "subjecting another person to sexual contact without the later person's consent". Apparently the Jew Strauss-Kahn "attempted" to cavort with a mysterious towering young muscular maid of the fanatical Muslim kind, whose legal migrant status is far from clear.

The old, weak, overweight, sick, oxygen deprived Dominique Strauss-Kahn is supposed to have overwhelmed the physically powerful, without causing any physical injury, probably using his dirty, powerful French mind. Powerful French minds, and the "French Theory", not far behind it, should be illegal, as they cause grave injury to the New York Centered World Trade plutocracy.

It is turning out that Ms tall, young and muscular victim, posed for racy and provocative pictures which ornament the frontcover of a magazine in Switzerland. You will not see those pictures in the USA, for obvious reasons of basic propaganda of the plutocratically financed politicians in New York. Don't be surprised if Ms Provocative shows up at the tribunal in a veil, clutching some beads, shaking all over with fear! Greed does that, sometimes, or more exactly the fear of not satisfying it.

The New York Sex Crime Unit is the object of a cult in America. It has 40 detectives: sex is big in New York, and its crimes numerous. Everybody says that the "Sex Crime Unit" is "very respected". It prosecutes, namely puts in cages and treats as dogs, 1,000 individuals a year. OK, one does not chain dogs, that would be cruel to animals, especially if innocent. Only 20 of those prosecutions of the "very respected Sex Crime Unit", result in condemnations, though. Let's think a second about what that means.

I am not saying that there should not 1,000 inquiries on "Sex Crimes". I think that any "Sex Crime" lead ought to be followed diligently, and even ferociously in the case of possible "pedophilia". But I think that, as for other suspicion of possible criminal activity, prosecution ought to be done very discreetly, to protect the innocent.

So let's consider the innocent. It turns out that the innocent are 98% of those the "very respected Sex Crime Unit" puritanizes and terrorizes every year.

I am just observing that 980 people a year get treated worse than dogs, like criminals, American style, and are found to be innocent, every year, in New York, about alleged sex crimes they did not commit. Although they were publicly humiliated, condemned in the court of public opinion, and punished for all to see, for crimes they did not commit. Punishing the innocent, especially publicly is outlawed in fully civilized society. that is actually why the law exists in the first place.

Now, if you beat a dog, he will turn nasty. especially if you do it for no good reason. Just try it. Moreover, far from being a deterrent, a rush to condemnation and condemnation encourages many to cross the Rubicon. Thus the question is this: is the "Sex Crime Unit" itself crime generating?

If police brutality itself is criminogen, a much needed explanation for the high rate of crime in the USA would offer itself. Criminogen police activity would go a long way towards explaining that about 10 million Americans are actively punished, under official condemnations, every year, with 2.5 million imprisonned. The highest rate in the world.
***

Speaking of Criminogen Police Hyper Activity,

A prestigious United Nation commission found that the "War Against Drugs" has not worked any better than the famous prohibition against alcohol in the USA, in the 1920s. The later had increased considerably organized crime, by making many in the USA accomplice with the mobsters. Prohibition was terminated by president Roosevelt.

Interestingly "drug abuse", which is punished, implies that "drug use", a milder form, should go unpunished. The point is that very dangerous drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and various "medical" neurological drugs, some given to children (Ritalin), are authorized. So why is not mild use of some other drugs also authorized?

The president of Bolivia has insisted that some mild coca should be allowed for sale outside of Bolivia (where it is legal).

Funny aside: although I use tea and coffee, I have never ever used alcohol and tobacco. I just did not like the idea to have to drink something to be merry, or poison the atmosphere, to look cool. Happiness and calm ought to be spiritually generated, for those who live by the superiority

However I have resided at high altitude in Bolivia, and loved coca tea (sold there in grocery stores). It's quite different from normal tea, but extremely nice. Energetic, soothing, friendly to the mind.

I can't imagine how one could abuse it, and what is wrong with it. Thus I deduce the screaming against some drugs is highly hypocritical, and it's not our ex-"blow" (cocaine) using "black" president who is going to contradict me.

Let's remember that coffee, at strong dosage, is forbidden at the Olympic Games. At very high doses (100 cups), coffee is lethal (so is water). However, correct usage of coffee is good for the mind, and for health in general (it has been proven to reduce Alzheimer).
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Rentiers, plutocracy, solutions...

2011-06-10T15:57:00.000-07:00

Krugman wrote an editorial claiming the "rule by rentiers". I guess that is less controversial than "rule by Pluto". However, Krugman describes "rule by wealth", the usual, non philosophical, meaning of "plutocracy":

"America’s job drought... has already gone on so long that the average unemployed American has been out of work for almost 40 weeks. Yet there is no political will to do anything about the situation. Far from being ready to spend more on job creation, both parties agree that it’s time to slash spending — destroying jobs in the process — with the only difference being one of degree.

Nor is the Federal Reserve riding to the rescue. On Tuesday, Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, acknowledged the grimness of the economic picture but indicated that he will do nothing about it.
... similar in Europe, but arguably even worse: European Central Bank’s hard-money, anti-debt-relief rhetoric... What lies behind this trans-Atlantic policy paralysis? I’m increasingly convinced that it’s a response to interest-group pressure. Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers — those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone else’s expense.

Of course, that’s not the way what I call the Pain Caucus makes its case. Instead, the argument against helping the unemployed is framed in terms of economic risks: Do anything to create jobs and interest rates will soar, runaway inflation will break out, and so on. But these risks keep not materializing... The reality is that both small businesses and workers are hurt far more by the weak economy than they would be by, say, modest inflation that helps promote recovery.

No, the only real beneficiaries of Pain Caucus policies (aside from the Chinese government) are the rentiers: bankers and wealthy individuals with lots of bonds in their portfolios.

And that explains why creditor interests bulk so large in policy; not only is this the class that makes big campaign contributions, it’s the class that has personal access to policy makers — many of whom go to work for these people when they exit government through the revolving door. The process of influence doesn’t have to involve raw corruption (although that happens, too). All it requires is the tendency to assume that what’s good for the people you hang out with, the people who seem so impressive in meetings — hey, they’re rich, they’re smart, and they have great tailors — must be good for the economy as a whole.

But the reality is just the opposite: creditor-friendly policies are crippling the economy. This is a negative-sum game, in which the attempt to protect the rentiers from any losses is inflicting much larger losses on everyone else. And the only way to get a real recovery is to stop playing that game. "

I have been saying this, for quite a while. So I will not disagree in first order. However, Krugman's semantics is conflating small rentiers, who typically live off interest from savings, and enormous plutocrats, who he metions, in so many words.

Moreover, as usual, Krugman is short on solutions. I commented the following, and the NYT published it:

4% inflation is best, 2% is too low. 2% is so low that there is not enough reserve, in case of recession. (If inflation becomes negative, durably so, lowering interest rates does not help, because they cannot be lowered below zero.)

Germany has led the pain caucus in Europe, and it has worked pretty well. So now the Germans (and the hard Franc architect Trichet, head of ECB) have the upper hand morally, intellectually, economically.

In any case none of this will not solve the globalization crisis. Which is the emigration of jobs to emerging countries. This is the underlying problem, and plutocracy has a direct hand in it, and it's hard to resist when equivalent jobs cost 5% overseas. What is the plan to invert that globalization, that flight of jobs, overseas, far away?

Well, let me answer it myself: no more speculation on finance by financiers, and massive investments in high tech, accompanied by tough IP protection, and a carbon trade tax, plus tough anti-slavery codes, worldwide.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Bits and Pieces, Early June 2011

2011-06-07T07:47:00.000-07:00

American Aggression Against Aghanistan:
The president of the USA, Jimmy Carter, signed a secret order of attack on the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, July 3, 1979. Thus the Afghan war was started by the USA, not bin Laden, 32 years ago. In other news, Merkel is quite disappointing, indeed. On the other hand, when they have tried all the bad solutions, further integration will be all what's left.
And this is true for the southern, and eastern side of the Mediterranean too, which is more important to Europe than Russia. Because Russia has only one way to go, whereas the fascist-theocratic mix along the shores of the Med could mean unending wars. Thus it has to be developed in secular democracy.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
***

HEALTH GREED?
American health care is, overall, much more expensive than the better performing health care systems of comparable countries. Therein the first problem. So let's seriate, and do first things first.

How come is USA health care so much more expensive? Because for example health care companies in the USA greed based system, advertize heavily. In most other countries, that's unlawful. The cost of the advertizing can exceed the research, for pharmaceuticals. That money is taken from patients, and is sent by health care plutocrats to their fellow advertizing plutocrats (and that may even be themselves, through shares!)
We call if health care, and that is what they have in many countries. But, in the USA, it ought to be called health greed. And that's not good.
PA
***

The Pluto In Plutocracy:
Plutocracy is not just about wealth ruling, but also about Pluto ruling. The fundamental urge of plutocrats is to make the people suffer, and it's true all over. As they are more crafty on Wall Street than in Russia, more power to them! In any case, for all and any plutocrats, caring about their own country does not register any cash, so it's rarely done.
PA
***

Emotional Dwarves:
Greed does not make the world go 'round. One needs more emotions than that. Public service one of them. This is what the People of the USA will have to learn someday, and throw the old demons out.
PA
***

GOLDMAN SACHS YOU CAN BELIEVE IN:
Future historians will laugh, and wonder why fools such as me believed in Obama's slogan: "Change You Can Believe In!" Indeed, which change would Goldman Sachs, Obama's greatest contributor, believe in exactly? Well exactly zero change, once they pocketed the public money offered to them by their agents in Washington, of course.

So most public money was sent to the vultures feeding on the economy, instead of empowering the public programs which were apparently beyond the feeble imagination of the plutocratic agents to even imagine. In any case, the agents were not paid for that, such was not the mission conferred to them by their private, filthy rich sponsors.

As in many a great power, the nominal leaders have so much hubris that they believe their intricate entanglements of corrupt plots is the way it has to be, and the way it can keep on being. But, ultimately, they are just small servants of what they do not understand, the will, in some men, to hurt most men.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

High Speed Rail Versus High Idiocy

2011-03-01T09:47:00.000-08:00

George Will, a salaried propagandist of the established order, condemns trains. I must admit that only private jets should get government subsidies, in a plutocracy. Whines Will:

"So why is America’s “win the future” administration so fixated on railroads, a technology that was the future two centuries ago? Because progressivism’s aim is the modification of (other people’s) behavior.

Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism."

Trains are a lot more empowering and individualistic than planes, as anybody who has travelled in both will recognize — and planes, not cars, are the main alternative to high-speed rail. Besides, what is empowering at driving a car? One becomes a slave to the art of avoiding accidents and respecting all laws and regulations.

Says Krugman: "And there’s the bit about rail as an antiquated technology; try saying that after riding the Shanghai Maglev."

Will is a clever man, indeed. He goes where the money is, and serves who Adam Smith called \"the masters\" (generations before Karl Marx). Clever he is, but not moral.

American individualism, like American exceptionalism, or Hitler's celebrated attachment to the right of minorities in the name of human rights (one of his main electoral platform points!) are much exaggerated notions. If the American elite is that individualistic, how come most of them think all the same?

By the way, there is a lot of high tech in very high speed trains. Maglev has no advantage over steel wheels, but a lot of disadvantages. Maglev uses a lot of light but flammable materials, and extravagant high magnetic fields, there have been very bad accidents. Whereas steel wheels can go wherever there are rails, not so with maglev.

The maglev speed record is just a mile per hour or so above the (French) high speed, steel wheels record of 575 kilometers per hour. At these speeds non trivial shock waves and resonance have to be solved. Pantographs maintain contact through electronic piloting.

An intermediate technology exists, capable of 250 km/h on conventional lines, where the trains lean in the turns (Russia bought it from French Alstom, which bought it from Italy).

Notice the attack of Will against "progress". This is one of the main point of American plutocratic propaganda: progress itself is the problem. Why so? Of course progress came with laws against slavery, murder and torture all of which handicap the truly wealthy. But there is more. Ultimately plutocracy rests on military force, which rests on lack of progress. Savages need savagery to justify their own existence.

At this point, American technolgical superiority is pretty much reduced to superior people killing technology. No wonder neoconservatives are against progress. more than 50% of the weapons sold, worldwide, are American made. An American president said: "The business of America is business". Does that mean that, nowadays, the business of America has become death?

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Cooking The Numbers

2011-02-19T09:04:00.000-08:00

In "Empire at the End of Decadence" (February, 18, 2011), Charles Blow declares that:
"It’s time for us to stop lying to ourselves about this country. America is great in many ways, but on a whole host of measures — some of which are shown in the accompanying chart — we have become the laggards of the industrialized world. Not only are we not No. 1 — “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” — we are among the worst of the worst.

Yet this reality and the urgency that it ushers in is too hard for many Americans to digest. They would prefer to continue to bathe in platitudes about America’s greatness, to view our eroding empire through the gauzy vapors of past grandeur."

And Charles Blow to quote numbers coming from organizations which have interest to exalt the Reagan view of the world. Even these numbers look bad. The real numbers would be even worse.

One has indeed to understand that many of these numbers go first through a dedicated filter of organizations (CIA, World Bank, Bureau of Labor Statistics, the pro-plutocracy magazine The Economist, etc.).

These organizations are determined to prove the superiority of the present American way of exploitation, as their thriving depends upon it.

For example the "percentage thriving" finds 50% more Americans "thriving", whereas only 33% of the French are "thriving". I know both countries extremely well, and I can tell you, it's not the case. What is perceived as thriving on one side of the Atlantic would be viewed as inimaginable misery, on the other side.

The French do not believe it's cool to claim they are thriving. Self glorifications led to sorry episodes such as Louis XIV or Napoleon. They cost millions of dead, and severely weakened the country. As the protestants were forced to flee by Louis the criminal, they enrich Germany, and eported wine making to South Africa. So later nazi germany invaded with some generals bearing French names.

The terrible wars of the Twentieth Century, which left metropolitan France 20% smaller than it would be otherwise (let alone the loss of the enormous empire, not all parts of it should have been disjoined, in a better world) were another case where glory itself came to be viewed as a colaborator of self extermination.

So the French believe, deep inside, that it is better to complain, and demonstrate. Whereas the Americans fear that if they are not perceived as winners, they will be run over.

So to complain about France as loudly as possible is a major French religion (it literraly ties the French together, for example during the ever popular demonstrations). But many major worries Americans have do not even register in France. For example health care, or child care, or education. Although the unemployment rates cannot be compared; as Krugman observed, France has actually a much higher employment rate of the 24 to 55 population.

This being said, the USA has a disease called hubris. The country takes itself for imperial rime, and is the last one to used the imperial system of units. The USA was also the only "democracy" to re-introduce slavery on its own territory, ot its own citizens since Europe had outlawed it, a full millennium before that.

The USA is a time-wrap. Long has been. Why? Because being primitive in some important ways allowed a self satisfied, oblivious mentality to reign, designed specifically to exterminate the natives. And thus gain a continent, making America's fortune.

Notice that the Boers and the British did not exterminate the natives in South Africa.

Now, this American mentality, lost in self grandeur, and oblivious delusion is backfiring, ever since it went on steroids with that mean and short sighted man, Reagan. Reagan' confusion between fortune and merit has ruled the land, in a last, self destructive spasm of a better forgotten past.
PA

Hold Your Horses About Egypt.

2011-02-13T21:41:00.000-08:00

The new ex-NeoConservatives sing song is to say they brought the Egyptian revolution, after trying everything under Bush, from billions to invasions.

However, what Bush's predecessors had tried, and what they had succeeded to do, is to subjugate the Arabs, using a hefty dose of support for old fashion Islam (Salafism) to do so. Bush's feeble efforts were an attempt to recover control. He did not. Nor is Obama (who is using cheaper and craftier methods).

The (present government of the) USA and its People (Peace be Upon It!) do not want a real Arab revolution, because it would mean oil at $300 a barrel. It would also mean that Israel could not afford anymore, its present leaders and their mean policies.

But this is not over. Right now, it is a coup, not a revolution: we were threatened with Suleiman Aleikum, the Moo-Barack from behind, as I pointed out in a somewhat timely manner, 3 days before Suleiman came crashing down.

A last minute change gives us the only serious democratic institution in Egypt, the army. Vice President Suleiman was livid, as he announced that in a 40 second adress, complete with God's mercy, Mubarak's resignation, and his own personal eclipse.

Speaking of mercy, it would be merciful if my incendiary essay on the subject had been read in high places...

However, the Egyptian army is also plutocratic. Generals are paid by Washington, especially when they retire. The Egyptian army controls as much as 15% of Egypt's GDP, and is fully part of the worldwide plutocracy. So this is not over.

It is far from clear that the Egyptian people will come out on top. A fortiori other Arabs. The obscene Mohammed VI is thriving in Morocco, having gathered 10% of GDP all by his little self.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Will to Intellectual Supremacy

2011-02-04T12:10:00.000-08:00

Here is an entire post of Paul Krugman, "Another Kind of Financial Fragility",
followed by my comment, which explains and amplifies what Krugman talks about. Namely, the mental fragility of the top banksters, who are revealing to be affected by the sort of madness hubris leads to:

"Recent events have a lot of economists working hard at trying to determine the causes of financial fragility — the vulnerability of some economies, ours very much included, to disruptive shocks that cause credit and spending to freeze.

But recent events have also highlighted another kind of financial fragility: the sensitive egos of powerful bankers. I’ve been calling this the Ma! He’s looking at me funny! syndrome; it’s quite something to behold.

In a way, it sort of makes sense. Any leading player in the world of finance makes so much money that he more or less literally already has everything money can buy. If he cares about making even more money, it’s purely as a way of keeping score. And once you’re motivated mainly by considerations of prestige, you start to care more about whether the president is saying nice things about you than whether his actual policies are letting you off scot-free from any consequences of your industry’s sins.

Anyway, a good read from Reuters about the fragile ego of Jamie Dimon, who is not only wealthy beyond count but has also received a lot of fawning press. But it’s apparently not good enough."
***

This observation of Paul Krugman is right on the mark.

I hold that there is such a thing as the Will to Intellectual Supremacy in human beings. OK, a number of thinkers, culminating with Nietzsche talked about the Will To Power, and even the Will To Knowledge, as Nietzsche did. But this is still different. The Will to Intellectual Supremacy makes people live and die, by, and for, ideas.

The Will to Intellectual Supremacy is specifically human. (Whereas the will to Power is exhibited by plenty of other species, only human have digitalized ideas, something they are equipped to transmit into a culture. Chimps have also ideas, but they can be transmitted only visually.)

An evolutionary advantage is that this Will to Intellectual Supremacy kicks in only when there is plenty enough ideas around, hence enough people, hence a good reason to find any reason to decrease the number of said people.

More importantly, though, the Will to Intellectual Supremacy creates a highly competitive environment for ideas. It makes ideas go to war against each other, and thus allows a selection of the fittest. Thus the will to Intellectual Supremacy strongly urges forward the evolution of ideas towards superior forms (superior in the sense that the enemy gets eaten, or something akin to that).

So Dimon, the bankster, fights to death to impose his views that plutocracy knows best, and is, overall, best. He goes according to instinct. He incarnates an animal force, with intellectual supremacy pretention.

Reasoning with a deamon such as Dimon is like reasoning with an Aztec priest. It is to others to master his ideas, and put them back in the cage they belong to.

And how were the Aztec priests defeated? By rising an army of their victims, having persuaded them that it was a war worth fighting, and that they could win, if they tried hard enough. And that it was shameful to do nothing, because the Aztec horror, a form of extreme plutocracy, did not belong on this Earth.

And now, in some ways, with thermonuclear nukes looming, the situation is potentially much worse, so the fight against plutocracy has to be even more radical.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Plutocracy Kills Progress

2011-01-30T13:23:00.000-08:00

Why has innovation slowed down? It has everything to do with the rise of plutocracy beyond the reasonable, and the promotion of the Dark Side of human psychology, Hades, to the detriment of the Light Side, the Enlightenment of mind, science, and technology..

This is why I like mild inflation: it makes technological implementation more profitable, hence the whole research system behind it, more attractive.

It is also why the prize system for technological innovation is so good: many aviation pioneers went to their death to get prizes, pushing, to do so, weird new machines, with fantastically creative engineering.

Another factor in innovation, sorry to say, is the military, in the technological superiority tradition of the Athenians, Romans and Franks (instead of the brute force of the masses).

The first cars, in the eighteenth century, were actually enormous (steam powered) all terrain vehicles mandated by a French military program. So were the first planes to take off with an engine. So were the first metal monoplanes. All French military programs, and so was initially nuclear energy (Paris 1938, later morphed into the \"Manhattan project\", 1942). Radar (and thus microwave) was also a military program (in many countries simultaneously during WWII).

So what is going on now? Why is innovation dying? Because the USA went from a nation of bold engineers (1941) to a nation of despicable plutocrats (2011). And it has been contagious, at least throughout the West.

Whereas the emerging countries, such as the BRIC, made the correct analysis that the West's superiority was due to science, technology, and many of them, such as now many Arab countries, or India, or Brazil, and China or Russia, in part, from the superiority of the mind, hence communications.)

This is not exactly the first time this sort of devolution, the one affecting the West now, this sort of take over of the Dark Side, happens: it has happened again and again in history. It happened to Athens, it happened to Rome, and there were periodical bouts of it during the European Middle Ages. each time plutocracy took over.

In the case of Athens, the Athenian hyper rich colluded with the thoroughly fascist imperialist Macedonian plutocrats, to crush democracy, and thus science and philosophy.

I use here the concept of \"Pluto\" in its most general meaning, covering the entire Dark Side, not just wealth. But wealth is the greatest facilitator, as it can exploit the exponential growth interest provides with.

The plutocrats themselves are not stupid; they reign through stupidity. Their enemy is intelligence, hence new forms of thinking, hence what feeds them, new philosophy, new ethics, new science, new technology.

If a youth is smart, right now, she will do as Obama does, and extends the hand to plutocrats. And the plutocrats will fill that hand. Thus the smart go to the wolves. And the smartest, like Demosthenes, the philosopher who condemned Macedonia, they may as well swallow poison, before the state police grabs them, as Demosthenes did.

And what is taking poison with them is the highest and best of what makes the human spirit, and stagnation ensues. At best. At worst, great mayhem, as under the Nazis.

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

How Economics & Morality Relate

2011-01-10T11:03:00.000-08:00

AS CIVILIZATION BLOSSOMS SO DO FASCISM AND PLUTOCRACY.

Economics is house management. Morality is what endures. Yes, that's the origin of the word! Better: it has got to be the origin of the concept: what is right is what endures. If it were not right, it would not endure, indeed. Thus morality contains the concept of sustainability.

Best house management would have to be the one that endures. Indeed, if the economy does not endure, it collapses, thus so does the food production system, and part of the population will not survive.

Hence the best economy is moral, in other words. And redistribution of riches sufficient to prevent accumulation of riches caused by mathematics rather than merit is necessary.

Those who do not believe in redistribution in riches are more primitive that the Neolithics who produced sustainable societies on the scale of centuries. The Neolithics understood the exponential intuitively, and realized that riches brought ever more riches to the very top of society, the more they grew, and that had nothing to do with the merit of the individuals, families, groups or classes thus advantaged.

Piling up riches at the top made society, overall, poorer. Poorer in riches, poorer in culture, intelligence, mind stuff.

The great ages of Athens and Rome, and the Franks, were preceded by revolutions, forced income redistribution, and the destruction of plutocracies. Crete had no extravagant plutocracy (just significant oligarchies). The assassinations (Athens), rebellion (Rome), full war (Franks) turned society upside down, like the plow allows the rich soil down below to come to light.

It was violent, but the best society sprang forth, and made more advanced philosophy the law of the land. All sorts of goodness came out, from superlative economics and military, to excellent poetry, science, and further philosophy and law.

Why such goodness? Democracy blossoms minds in parallel. It is not just the "Open Society" Pericles and his philosophical advisers vaunted, it is the open minds of multitude of minds exchanging thoughts and feeling in an immense eco system of consciousness.

Plutocracy, and its associated fascism is all about a few taking all the decisions. Fascism is not new: it is the number one trick of primate defense. Baboons are expert fascist, when threats appear: they group up behind their most powerful leaders, female with the young hidden inside the group. Then the group does what the most powerful, most decisive males, the Golos, decide to do, and follow them as one: E PLURIBUS UNUM.

A chimpanzee variant of fascism occurs when chimps form a file, behind their leader, stop talking, and stealthily invade another group territory, in the hope of surprising an individual, and killing it. So fascism is so old, at least 40 million years, since there are the likes of baboons, and they thrive, that it has got to have become an instinct.

Plutocracy however is new, it's not in our biological inheritance, but an emerging property: it needed capital to exist. Long ago, capital was a harem, and a territory. But then the genus Homo appeared, and tools became capital too. When the Neolithic started, and the first cities appeared, capital became potentially gigantic: it could be a city, and extend over a country.

Some individuals, families, groups and finally classes were able to exploit the fascist instinct and the exponential, to create the new phenomenon of plutocracy.

The Neolithic was a total success: man took control of the planet. Capital and populations exploded by a factor of 10,000 for population, and much greater for capital.

Both fascism and the exponential exponentiate themselves to ever more tremendous heights as they grow (the growth of exponential is proportional to itself, just as capital and population do before disaster strikes). Thus they have become the nemeses of civilization, the more civilization grows.

Fascism exerts its seduction always. A case in point is what happens in democratic revolutions. They are born out of the desire by the People to redistribute riches. However, as adversity arises, fascism has to come to their defense.

An example is a Corsican artillery captain. Under the vengeful leadership of the British leader Pitt, anxious that France would not become more of a competitor to London after having a successful revolution, as Britain had a century earlier, the plan was conceived to invade France from Provence. Toulon and its two bays were conquered by an army and navy of British, Spanish and French royalists. The commanding republican generals were incompetent. Napoleon schemed to have them replace, then implemented his own plan, and attacked. He was seriously wounded by a bayonet , but the victory was total, and the British fleet, now exposed to French artillery, sailed away the next day. Napoleon was made into a general directly. He would soon lead French armies to great victories (other French generals did too, because, at that point France was republic fighting an obvious coalition of fascists, it was Greece versus Persia, all over again).

Napoleon was a military genius, thus everybody deduced, and especially himself, that he was a genius in all ways: the monkeys, when threatened, love to group up behind a smart, bold warrior. And when not threatened, it is easier to have just one guy doing all the thinking. In the end, Napoleon turned into a bloody tyrant who was still talking to his soldiers as if they were all "comrades" (a trick from Alexander and his "companions").

In the end, intellectual and political fascism led directly to Napoleon's disastrous campaign of 1812, the attempted submission of Russia. Napoleon a giant multinational European army of 700,000 in 5 months, because he was alone to take all the decisions, and thus took a lot of stupid ones. By then he did not have peers to put him back to sanity. That does not mean that plutocracy and fascism can always be corrected for the best. The Mayas collapsed, all by themselves, and stayed 98% collapsed by the time the Spanish showed up, six centuries later.

Right now, as relatively fewer and fewer Americans, go to state of the art schools, American society is ever becoming, relatively speaking, less of a state of the art society. Plutocracy does not mind; they always have India and China to invest in. But beware the history of Germany!
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Good Will Is Not Enough

2010-12-28T23:55:00.000-08:00

Is the USA a bystander, or a perpetrator? We all know the answer. The USA is the world greatest polluter and consumer, once the factories working in China for the USA are considered.
As the wise has said, and will say, for evil to triumph, all it takes is for men, and countries, of good will, to do nothing. The USA has done nothing, once again, as happened when fascism rose. And evil will triumph. Again.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Obama, Funny Guy

2010-09-07T14:47:00.001-07:00

So finally Obama is going to stimulate infrastructure instead of sending palliative money to daily spending. 50 billion dollars.
France is building several LGVs, Lignes a Grande Vitesse (High Speed Rail Lines). One of them is the TGV des Metropoles du Sud (Southern Metropolises LGV). Presently High Speed Rail can go only at 125 mph on the regular lines on that 150 miles region. The new speeds will be up to 250 mph.
Cost? About 30 billion dollars. Just that one line.

Compare with Obambi.
PA

Imagine there is no thinking...

2010-08-30T07:02:00.000-07:00

Plato and Aristotle were pro-fascist, pro-plutocratic. They naturally recommended intellectual fascism, and thus, censorship in general, and suspicion towards art and poetry, or the imagination.

The imagination branches out possibilities and probabilities into the future. Art, poetry just put it down into a material medium. To be against it, is to be against freedom of minds, and the future. A tall order. But not tall enough for fascism and plutocracy, whose very essence is to crack down on independent minds, and the future.

Aristotle was more open to art than Plato. However, even the invention of the word "catharsis" and the concept attached to it by Aristotle is suspicious. The qualities in poetry Plato thought so negative were useful to "purge" violent and destructive emotions. Such was the importance of performance art for Aristotle: a will to control permeates his "Poetics".

By enacting violence and destructive emotions on the stage, poetry "purged" audiences of these negative traits. Thus catharsis elevated the human personality and made better domesticated citizens, ready to serve Aristotle's pupil, Alexander.

We are far from the rebellious spirit the Franks would impose later to the Roman (Catholic!)empire.

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Carbon Tax To Reduce China

2010-06-24T21:37:00.000-07:00

Krugman accuses China of playing games with its overvalued currency. He threatens trade sanctions.

Instead of talking sanctions, why don't we talk carbon tax? That would be more polite.

Let me explain for those who are not in the know: any item bought from China has a hidden cost in carbon pollution which is much greater than in goods locally produced (no transportation costs) and, moreover, China uses much more very polluting coal to produce said goods. By slapping on Chinese goods the cost of this pollution that everyone pays for one could cripple Chinese trade. And Chinese pollution is a serious problem, not just in China: it's a major contributor to pollution, worldwide, even in the Arctic, where mercury vapor from burning Chinese coal poisons the sea life.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Trading Vipers

2010-06-11T11:52:00.000-07:00

From a pirate of finance: "newsflash: people with no hands on experience of derivative markets should stop writing things that make them look stupid."Pete D

Reply:
@ Pete D: What is stupid is to derivate most of the universe free, investable capital, towards a derivative universe. because it is the path of destruction of civilization.

Not all trading is allowed: for example, one cannot buy and sell people anymore. Although it was long lawful in the USA. Progress is often about making unlawful tomorrow what was lawful, yesterday. Those who don’t understand that are stupid. Ultimately capital represents energy, and deliberately wasting capital in mutual bets in derivative universes is a crime, because, in the fullness of time, we have only that much energy to waste before switching to a more sustainable civilization. If we don't switch, we must deperish.

But of course, some people are so stupid that all they understand is their pocket, and how to fill it.

A viper’s brain is fast, about one thing, and it does only that one thing really better than any other creatures: inject poison, and swallow. I do not expect vipers to understand much more than that. Derivative traders and vipers may be fast and well fed, but they do not a civilization make.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
PA

Way Out

2010-05-20T22:27:00.000-07:00

The way out of the present Great Depression should have three axes:

1) a higher inflation target, around 4%. The European Central Bank targeted 1%, which is 1% removed from deflation, which is a trap with no exit.

2) government organized stimulus, New Deal style. It worked in the 1930s, in the USA and Germany.

3) national banks investing in the real economy (an old European trick now used by China and India)

Let's notice that Japan would be in depression, if not for massive government spending. Now, of course Japan has a total debt of 200% of GDP, nearly twice the one of Greece.

The American plutocrats' obsession about Greece not be ready for the euro is neither here nor there.

The drachma was converted at the wrong rate.

Moreover, the present crisis is made to bring the euro down to parity with the dollar quickly. Europe is punishing China and the USA for atrocious behavior at the Copenhagen climate conference. The euro is still more than 20% overvalued right now (mid May 2010).

American economists may have to enjoy the future double dip, if they do not mind USA plutocracy more than they do the European Union.

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

American Plutocrats No Pasaran Mañana.

2010-05-10T16:35:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman, playing half clueless, bemoans that the Euro did not head back up in the stratosphere, where it can't breathe: "Yes, I know — the point is not to lift the euro. Still, the exchange rate is a quick measure of the impact on eurozone confidence, which bounced with the policy announcement but doesn’t seem to be staying up …"

OK, let's repeat slowly, so Krugman can learn the half of the lesson he did not quite digest yet:

To relaunch growth in Europe, the Euro, and its poodle, the Pound, have to come down big time. So rescue all you want, but go down. Go down at a more sedate pace, but go down. Down is a long way down.

The Euro was established by fixing parity against the very long term value of the French Franc. More recently, under the EMu and the Ecu, the long term average was a bit higher, at 1.07.

In any case, the support of the European Union for the economy of the USA is over: time to care about number one, namely Europe. The modern version of Smoot Hawley bill, Obama's ill conceived plan to double USA exports, will not pass. No pasaran.

Smoot-Hawley, passed in July 1930, boosted tariffs by 50%, and caused the Great Depression of the 1930s. To lift the Euro by 60% belongs to the same sort of ilk. Fortunately this time Europe is unified and democratic, and, while the somewhat confused Merkel went to find solace with her Russian friends, Sarkozy and company did what needed to be done (OK, they may have started the whole thing as a device to lower the Euro, agreed, so they were well placed to stop what they started...)

Notice that, last time this battle cry was offered, by "La Pasionara" during the attack against the Spanish republic by the fascist forces of Italy and Germany, with a rebel army from spanish Morocco headed by traitor general Franco,they passed nevertheless. And stayed for several decades.

But they passed, because they flew overhead, fueled by Texas oil (it was one of the rare things that made Adolf Hitler laugh). The Spanish Navy had blockaded Africa, where the fascist rebel force was, so Hitler's Luftwaffe organized an aerial bridge into Spain. That is also what we are talking about when we defend the Euro.

Nowadays, though, the risk has come down. There is less oil in Texas, and we know where the Gulf oil goes, and the US Army is searching for oil in all the wrong places...

Those who bathe in crude shall drown in it too.

PA

Fusion-Fission Solution

2010-05-03T11:08:00.000-07:00

Oil and the like can be extracted at increasingly unbearable cost (same holds for coal and sand oil, shale oil, etc...). It's not just a question of CO2, but of exhausted technology. Something similar happened to the Romans: they called it: "the world is getting old".

A program to build Fusion-Fission thermonuclear power plants program should be started in a hurry. Besides enormous clean energy production, it would allow to get rid of nuclear waste, all over the world, and produce plenty of electricity to run an electrical economy (besides renewable energies).

All indicates that, differently from PURE thermonuclear fusion plants, the technology exists already, it's just a matter of putting together the details. Existing thermonuclear reactor (such as the JET, Joint European Torus) can produce plenty of fast neutrons to split, among other things, conventional, not very radioactive U 238. Future reactors such as ITER aim at producing ten times as much energy thermonuclearly as is put in. But the walls will take a beating.

In a fusion-fission reactor, the walls are made of a fissionable materials (U238 split under fast neutrons, as produced by thermonuclear fusion; enriched in U235 uranium splits under slow neutrons). So the walls get destroyed, made progressively less radioactive (I simplify), but that produces energy. This way all nuclear waste can be burned.

The reason why fusion-fission has not been pushed so far is that Beyond Pain (BP) companies such as BP have zero interest to see it appear.
PA

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

WHY BIG BANKERS ARE OUTLAWS.

2010-04-27T18:15:00.000-07:00

1) We are living in a state of law. Supposedly.

2) That state is democracy, the rule of the demos, the people.

3) Political leaders have recently given PRIVATE unelected individuals, the bankers, the means, and the right to create money, the money everybody uses, through debt, starting from PUBLIC funds.

3) Contradicts the union of 1) and 2).

Thus, the present system incite, big, money creating BANKERS TO BECOME GANGSTERS, and OUTLAWS.

It is as simple as that. Thus one needs to get rid of the private fractional reserve PUBLICLY funded money creating system.

PA

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Punish China For The Right Reasons.

2010-03-16T11:08:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman has been the instigator of what is now a vast chorus to view the underevaluation of the Chinese currency as a serious problem. I do agree, sort of, but I extend the critique to the US dollar: it, too is undervalued.

So, according to Paul, China has got to be punished, because it exports its savings, and we are so incompetent, we do not know what to do with them, because we are not expansionary enough... As it is, this reminds me a bit of punishing people, because they saved too much, and were too industrious, thus owning too much, in part thanks of an alleged conspiracy of them... Hmmm... Was not that exactly the Nazis' main drift against a particular minority?

Being also as bad as they come, I also want to punish the Chinese, but only to encourage them to become better planetary citizens. I do think that the technological and economic, not to say social stagnation of the West is the West's problem, not China, and China ought not to be punished for it. Instead the West ought to be punished for not striving to stay on top of the existing hierarchy, and on top of the planetary problems we have.

Not to preserve the existing hierarchy will lead to instability, hence war. Same with not solving the drastic ecological problems (acidification, water, climate change, population growth).

If China manipulates its currency, it has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. First. Also the duties ought to correspond to the minimum of the proven depreciation; if the renminbi is undervalued by 10% minimum, then impose 10% minimum duties, etc.

China working hard and saving is a good thing. We ought to emulate it. What we ought to not emulate, and encourage China to get out of, is its carbon solution. Reigning in our plutocrats, in bed with the Chinese dictatorship, is our problem, not China's. Just as the plutocrats out-maneuvered the Nazis, in the end, they will out-maneuver China at the first occasion. They out-maneuvered us on health care, and with the on-going existence of their vampiric financial scheme. We do not want them to out-maneuver us again, using China as a trampoline.

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

The Main Points About The Regalian Banking System We Have.

2010-03-15T18:50:00.000-07:00

The first key point about finance as it exists is that private, unsupervised, unelected financial establishments are able to create most of the money in use in the realm. It is a major misleading omission to behave as if this was compatible with democracy (see what Rothschild thought about it below).

The second key point is that they are allowed to create it through debt, in other words, serfdom.

The third key point is that modern financial creators are allowed to give said money they created to whoever, and whatever they please. "Whoever" they call that "talent", and "whatever" is the derivative universe, which, as its name indicates, is not the real universe. The derivative universe is just a way to claim imaginary revenue, imaginary profits, and, thus, all too real bonuses, and manipulative powers onto the world of economics, politics, and sociology.

The fourth key point is that they avoid supervision, election, and, in general the entire democratic process; this is called the 'independence" of the Federal Reserve bank. "independence" from democracy, that is.

All these powers of modern finance are regalian.

As Rothschild said: "I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, ...The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply."

But kings, especially non elected ones, become arrogant, because they want to celebrate their power. Thus now they have forced the people to humiliate itself by forking over all its economies, and then by making it plain that they could get away with anything. Hence the criminality, and blatant influence peddling.

None of this has to be. making banks into the realm's money creator is an extraordinary privilege that was not accorded during most of civilization, for the reason that, as Rothschild said, it makes the king into a puppet. Thus Obama is a puppet, says Rothschild.

One could revert to the earlier system used in feudal times and times before that: banks lend what has been deposited with them, and not more. Governments would then create money as needed. To insure that enough money would be created for valid projects and investments, banking officials would be rewarded reasonably according, and proportionally to the long term profitability of said projects and investments. In other words, the more leveraged a bank is, the more governmentalized it ought to be.

The only banks who are truly private are those using strictly no leverage. Others ought to be viewed as the government institutions they truly are, meaning that the government is not what conventional wisdom assumed it to be.

PA
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

The Really Unfair Chinese Economic Advantage

2010-03-15T17:19:00.000-07:00

If currency intervention with the aim of undervaluing the Chinese currency can be proven, there are official avenues to make that official through the IMF. This ought to be the next step. Guilt has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt before punishment can be envisioned.

The real problem with China is somewhere else: western plutocrats have used it as an avenue to avoid Western various regulations, especially about pollution. Thus an unfair trade practice and a world pollution (Chinese pollution strikes the USA). The way out is to install a carbon tax, as France is in the process of doing. Then it could go worldwide, and China will lose an enormous comparative advantage of the criminal type (coal Chinese pollution poisons the Arctic with condensing mercury vapor, for example).

Plutocrats used Nazism in a similar way, starting 90 years ago (yes plutocratic intervention and procreation of Nazism preceded its existence). In that case, American plutocrats, starting in the 1920s were able to turn around American anti-monopoly laws, and, later many other laws. Plutocracy fed fascism, and reciprocally. When fascism died, plutocracy thrived even more, and here we are…

PA
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

What's Fundamentally Wrong With Banking Today

2010-03-08T01:04:00.000-08:00

What is fundamentally wrong is that bankers are the ones allowed to create capital in the fractional reserve system AND directly profit, without any reservation, from that capital creation. Money creation by private, unelected, unsupervised, intrinsically biased and interested bankers is a REGALIAN function. For millennia that regalian function was exerted by the rex, the king, namely the state.

Money creation is NOT intrinsic to banking: originally banking did not have that regalian function, and just loaned money which was deposited in banks, one on one.

So what we have in front of our eyes is a worldwide CIVILIZATIONAL REGRESSION. (By the way, to claim that some countries escaped the crisis is a bit silly, because it may simply be that the crisis is better hidden there, or, thanks to derivatives, was exported somewhere else (in Canada the Whistler resort is bankrupt, maybe a symptom of something bigger).)

The crisis has reinforced bankers as rulers. Even France is having severe problems with the increased arrogance of powerful bankers: major profitable French companies could not get loans recently for specific obviously profitable projects. They complained to the presidency, which convoked the bankers. But BNP, the giant French bank, thanks to derivatives, and the like, made nearly 6 billion euros profit in 2009: hard to argue with such success in a system where bankers are kings to start with: who is going to reduce the size of their crowns? (Disclosure: I bank at BNP and has known some top executive there.)

The problem is not just to resist powerful bankers, or protecting financial consumers (after all many of the later profited from the crisis, and are now living rent free in their ill gotten properties, and the bankers are the first consumers of their own banks!). The problem is HOW to PUT BANKING UNDER DEMOCRATIC SUPERVISION.

As Baron Nathan Rothschild (yes, from the Rothschild family) put it: "I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, …The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply."

In the USA, the Federal Reserve Bank is independent of democracy. It depends only upon bankers. Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan Chase, for example, sits on the board of the New York Fed. Obama probably dreams every day of having this good friend who impresses him so much, Secretary of the Treasury: after all, Rubin, Clinton's first Sec of Treasure served at Goldman Sachs for 26 years prior.

Economy Nobel Laureate Stiglitz recently called the (financial) system in the USA "corrupt". Because of the size and leadership of the USA, it's the entire civilization which is now "corrupt". Time to review the basics, and it's not just about making consumerism of a few wiser. it's time to all get wiser, and more moral.

PA

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/greed-cant-lead/

Mediterranean Union As Israel Palestine Solution

2010-02-12T00:19:00.000-08:00

Roger Cohen in Hard MidEast Truths, opines on the Palestine-israel problem that: "If there are not two states, there will be one state, and very soon there will be more Palestinian Arabs in it than Jews."

In other words, Cohen says that the present Jewish supremacist strategy leads to the extinction of Israel.

Cohen calls onto Obama to rise to the occasion. But...

Considering that Obama cannot see the simplest thing, such as the present big banking sector having nothing to do with the free market, it is dubious he can do anything useful about Israel and Palestine. His Cairo discourse, much admired, was pure demagogy with no concrete content anywhere, whatsoever.

Many are happy about the creeping annexation. Many do not see the hatred, and it is a truth that a lot starts in religious texts.

The USA was not a force behind the creation of Israel. All it probably sees about the area is oil, oil, oil, and the strategy of dividing to conquer, to get ever more oil. The 250,000 troops on the ground put there by Bush and Obama are clear enough a symbol.

Ultimately the only pacific way out is to extend a variant of the European construction, a Mediterranean Union, to the entire region (as Sarkozy initially proposed). This dialogue worked well in Europe, there is no reason it would not work as well around the Mediterranean. A target for conceptual destruction ought to be superstitions and their associated racisms (clearly, for example, some part of the Qur'an are as offensive against the Jews as possible; even the Nazis in their worst state did not talk about the people they hated the most in such an absurdly violent fashion.)

Indeed the last time the Mediterranean area was united was under the Roman empire. It is the rise of superstition, even well before, centuries before the invention of Islam, that originated the present problems (by leading for example to the destruction of the gigantic Jewish temple in Jerusalem and then spreading aggressive heresies of Judaism, namely Christianism and Islamism).

If we want peace, we need to go back to some somewhat similar situation to that which existed under Rome (but with more national freedom, as exists in the European Union.) So the Mediterranean Union is the solution. Anything else is a waste of time, and should lead to an orgy of destruction, especially when some youth understand better the game of the USA.

Patrice Ayme

Banks As Government

2010-02-11T00:43:00.000-08:00

The clueless Obama just claimed that bankers' bonuses are no more shocking than athletes' incomes. According to him, it would be against the free market to be against said bonuses.

But of course bankers are getting all their money from the government. Banks are not about the "free market". They are about the mechanism to create money that can be used in the market, and all over the economy. "Private" banks have recently been endowed with a prerogative governments kept for themselves for millennia. Apparently Obama does not know any of this.

A way to support banks has been by giving them hundreds of billions through TARP (which I mockingly called at the time: Transfering Assets To Rich People).

Another way has been to buy mortgages using taxpayer money to keep interest on mortgages low. This is not innocent as it looks. In connection with the FHA back-up of most new real estate loans, it is mostly a government run subprime program to the benefit of bankers and real estate flippers. What is the interest for the bankers and their White House? In light of a FEW transactions to flippers (or to the banks themselves!), it allows bankers and White House to claim houses are really worth a lot, therefore principals should not be lowered (a cornerstone of the friendly-to-bankers policy).

Another way to help banks is for the government to give them money at basically zero interest, and then allow them to re-invest the same money with the same government, at 3.5% interest.

More fundamentally, the main support to the banks has been the FRACTIONAL RESERVE SYSTEM. It allows private, unelected, unsupervised individuals called the bankers, to create the money society uses. Moreover, it is created under the form of debt. Thus it tends to increase and put the vast majority of People into two categories: those without money, completely out of society, a sort of underclass, and those who are over-indebted.

The Fractional Reserve System [FRS] makes bankers enormously powerful, because it makes them in control of most of the money (under a reserve requirement of 10% they control about 4/5 of it all; it can come arbitrarily close to 100% as the reserve requirement is allowed to go down to zero).

Rothschild actually explained, more than two centuries ago, that the FRS made bankers into the people who controlled nations.

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

AMERICA IS NOT YET GONE

2010-02-07T23:16:00.000-08:00

... BUT, WITHOUT A CHANGE OF MOOD, IT'S ON ITS WAY...

Paul Krugman in America Is Not Yet Lost makes an excellent depiction of the dismal situation of the USA, comparing it to Poland in the 18C.

"The way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government, and senators should change the rules to end obstructionism."

Constitutional stasis in the USA contrasts with the hyper dynamic constitutional process in Europe. Now, of course, Europe is changing constitutions globally and nationally, and regionally because of European construction. But also the diffuse feeling was left among Europeans, after the war against fascism (1870-1945), that it was most important (namely nothing more important) to have the best constitution imaginable. Even if it meant tinkering with it all the time.

That is one of the reasons for the Euro: to prevent competitive devaluation, a cause of war (for example Germany destroyed its own currency in the 1920s rather than to help repairing North West France that it had just deliberately destroyed, all the way down to telephone poles). True, such a concept as a unique currency brings, in turn, problems, but those can be, in turn, solved, modulo more constitutional tweaking.

In the USA the parliamentary system is broken, in part because the Senate (not really a democratic representation since a Senator in Wyoming represents 200,000 people and one in California, 19 millions!) damages the work of the national assembly (\"Congress\").

In a country such as France, the Senate plays a distinct role from the National Assembly, and both get together with the president in constitutional changes (the so called \"Congres\").

The USA is not yet lost, true, but far gone, already. Only a mighty neurohormonal and cultural reflection will get it out of its plutocratic stupor. And that is hard to do, after decades of cool.

PA

AS COOL AS DEAD IN THE WATER ?

2010-01-18T02:33:00.000-08:00

Krugman, finally following the drift in my various blogs makes a direct attack on Mr. Obama's mentality. So did "The Economist". As Krugman puts it gently:
"President Obama’s troubles result from misjudgments: the stimulus was too small; banking policy wasn’t tough enough; and he didn’t shelter himself from criticism."

Well, here is my add-on, and i have plenty of reasons, some even personal, to not be that gentle, although I stay within the best of my rational consideration:

Obama is persuaded that cool is cool, and that it is all what a man has to do with his brain to excel: do what you are told, and look cool. Cool is the way. But Obama knows physics not. When you want to change things, you don't wait, cool as a glacier, for the great melting of the minds. Heat is motion. If you want to move, you have to get hot.

Obama came in, he admired Reagan (an actor who got the plutocratic demolition of the USA on the way), and hired Larry Summers (Reagan's internal affairs economic adviser, and the main DESTROYER OF ROOSEVELT's financial SAFEGARDS, as Treasury Secretary earlier, under Clinton). Obama was elected, it turned out, to pursue Larry Summers' America: for thirty years going, and still collapsing. Then Obama talked as if all he had to do was to persuade the elders of the republican party: dreaming of his father. How touching.

So, Godspeed America (as the actor Reagan would say). Even the pro-plutocratic magazine "The Economist" wants Obama to put fighting gloves on (Jan 14, cover). But, before putting the gloves on, maybe Obama should warm his brain enough to find who to beat up, and that his first enemies are in his own cabinet. As it is, Obama is surrounded by cool plutocrats whose only real ambition is to fill up their pockets some more, in tomorrow's even cooler plutocracy, so they make it all it can be.

PA

Give A Secular Iran Its Nuclear Umbrella

2009-12-31T03:01:00.000-08:00

Secularism is the religion of the age ("age", as a period of 120 years, is what "seculum" means). It can tolerate superstition, or many, but just that way: as tolerance.

What we have instead in Iran is a superstition masquerading as a republic. But the public ought to be free to think about whatever, in whichever way, and conduct its life accordingly, after democratic debate, whereas the superstition orders them to believe in its arbitrary credo. Moreover, that arbitrary credo is so incredibly primitive, so tribal, obscurantist, sexist and anti-intellectual that it makes the European Middle Ages seem more enlightened in many ways. Thus, there can be no compromise. The Qur'an, which contains some horribly fascist orders, has to release its grip on the Iranian public.
Once this is done, or on its way, France, and, or the USA, or, better, both together, should formally guarantee the secular Iranian republic its security, with a formal defense treaty, including the nuclear weapons umbrella.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Profit madness...

2009-12-31T01:25:00.000-08:00

Statements such as “For one, the private economy invests each dollar of earnings more efficiently than the government spends the taxes collected. have to be put in context[”http://learningfromdogs.com/2009/12/29/government-spending-and-hamburgers]. Always.

Say the “private enterprise” is a casino in Las Vegas. So is it “more efficient” to put up another massive tower in Vegas than to give money to researchers at NIH looking for a cure for cancer or aging? Is it more efficient to send Vegas money to some tax heaven, than to have the Federal government pay some private enterprise to make thousands of millimetric bodyscanners, and pay for more efficient intelligence services?

I am very far from a statist fanatic. The US gov should not have saved General Motors, for example. It should be sold to Renault (if the later is still interested by devouring it).

But, ultimately, in a democracy, it’s the government that calls the shots, not the rich. In the later case, when the Rich calls the shots, all the shots, it’s called a PLUTOCRACY. And, in the fullness of time, it does not work as well. History, and theory, show.

PA
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

GOLD MAN SACKS AND SAYS: CLAP AND TREAD.

2009-12-08T11:53:00.000-08:00

(Similar but larger essay on Wordpress to come soon)

GOLD MAN SAYS: CLAP AND TREAD. OFF WITH ITS HEAD!

Obama's USA, right now, intends to reduce emissions only with a "Cap and Trade" system. "Cap and Trade" was used, supposedly successfully, in the USA, to reduce acid rain. However, Europe controlled its acid problem without "Cap and Trade". Regulations can work better. After all, there are just regulations for toys, cars, house appliances and medical drugs. One does not do "Cap and Trade" with carcinogens. why to do it with something even more dangerous?

Oh, we shall cap the number of slaves to one million, and then trade them? No, we shall not. Why? Because trading slaves is bad, that's why. This is what happened in Europe: too many free pollution permits were given, well, for free. That was embarrassing. Europe was saved by its enormous pre-existing energy taxes and regulations.

Then "Cap and Trade" has been used in the European Union for 5 years, for CO2 reductions, and it has been hard to implement. Many a European company turned it into an outrageous subsidy (sometimes through elaborated misrepresentation of their previous emissions). "Cap and Trade", in Europe, is a second order effect on the reduction of CO2 production, the main effect being regulations, and taxes on fuel, energy, and now carbon (in France for the later).

The great advantage of "Cap and Trade", for the USA, is that it is a subsidy to the usual suspects, led, of course, by Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs, also known as "Government Sachs", is the true government of the USA, motivated not by what the American rabble wants, but by the profit motive. "Cap and Trade" will make Gold Man richer, so Gold Man is all for it, so it will happen. What should progressives do? Well, denounce loudly but support meekly, because a bit of progress is better than none.

SELLING OUT:
But then here comes Paul Krugman. Among many raging American "conservatives" Krugman has an extreme leftist reputation, but many of the policies he has advocated recently, or opinions he has presented, the elected leaders of the European right would reject with horror as intolerably right wing. An example is the zero interest rate policy, a lamentable give away to banks. Krugman supports it, in spite of its disastrous effects on the saving rate, American seniors, the dollar, stable currency rates, and the unfair cheapening of the USA.

So now Krugman has turned into a herald for Goldman Sachs (See the annex below on Gold Man Sacks and Cap & Trade). In Unhelpful Hansen
James Hansen is a great climate scientist. He was the first to warn about the climate crisis; I take what he says about coal, in particular, very seriously.
Unfortunately, while I defer to him on all matters climate, today’s op-ed article suggests that he really hasn’t made any effort to understand the economics of emissions control. And that’s not a small matter, because he’s now engaged in a misguided crusade against cap and trade, which is — let’s face it — the only form of action against greenhouse gas emissions we have any chance of taking before catastrophe becomes inevitable.

With all due respect, you are making an Americano-American reasoning here. Hansen is right, you are not. "We have no chance of getting a carbon tax for the foreseeable future", you say. Who is "we"? WE, all of use, have just one planet, one biosphere, and the USA, or more exactly the American oligarchs and plutocrats and their factories in China are polluting it to death.

The average American produces 24 tons of CO2 per person, the average French produces 6 tons. The French don't live four times better, but close. It's directly related. When all you do is waste, all you get is hate.

The rest of the world has implemented plenty of various taxes, for example on gasoline, etc. Even China has augmented enormously its gasoline tax in the last 18 months. Moreover, China has made its own increasingly stringent European laws on carbon emissions (although an electric car in China will emit 231 grams of CO2 per kilometer, whereas it would emit only 21 grams in France; American cars emit, in the average 333 grams, and the latest european regulation are for 120 grams…)

France, not content with its formidable taxes on energy, is introducing a carbon tax, on top of them, January 1, 2010, in 3 weeks. If the USA will not listen to reason, it goes without saying that carbon taxation on imports could be used as a way to demolish the industry of the USA, or whatever is left of it, after the Obama administration has subsidized it to death (this is an allusion to the 70 billion dollars injected by Obama in thoroughly inept General Motors… Ah, long gone are the days when an astute GM and a Jew hating Ford worked for Hitler, producing most of some of the types of vehicles Hitler's armed forces used, while naïve American GIs battled them on the ground… Where is the subtlety of old gone? Wall Street's world control is slipping, dissipating as carbon smoke in thin air…)

Europe introduced colossal taxes on energy long ago. Even Norway, which produces more oil per person than Saudi Arabia, has colossal energy taxes. In many European countries the price of gas is close to ten dollars a gallon (although oil is intrinsically cheaper there, being closer to cheap production centers).

Europe had "Cap and Trade" for years. It was a formidable subsidy for polluters. The carbon market is based in Paris. Even then, the French regulators were unable to prevent various misuses of the system. In the USA, Goldman Sachs will be in charge. Great. You will get the usual "Clap and Tread". Everybody applauding Gold Man Sacks treading on the people.

Praying at the feet of Goldman Sachs does not help. The rest of the world is increasingly fed up with the American attitude. I will expand my complaint on my site.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

WHAT TOO BIG OUGHT TO MEAN.

2009-11-26T07:25:00.000-08:00

An amendment to the Financial Stability Improvement Act (currently before the House Financial Services Committee):

..." would empower federal regulators to rein in and dismantle financial firms that are so large, inter-connected, or risky that their collapse would put at risk the entire American economic system, even if those firms currently appear to be well-capitalized and healthy."

Some have proposed thus to limit each single bank to 1%, or 2% of GDP. This is not enough, not to say outright naive.

Indeed, however small, if the banks all conspire, and are all allowed to invest in the same non productive derivatives, they will still divert capital away from the real economy to imaginary profits justifying indecent and damaging bonuses, while starving the real economy.

The notion of integration in the mathematical sense has to be introduced. This is a known problem with carcinogens. To limit each given carcinogen below a threshold is not enough. By piling up carcinogens under the threshold, one can get large carcinogenicity. Thus Germany has introduced an overall integrated carcinogenicity limit. France, and the EU will soon follow suit (under scientific pressure).

So, by analogy, what should be limited is the overall risk to the system, and that should evaluated by checking how much risk is in the global system. An obvious way out is to regulate derivatives by limiting leverage, certifying each and every single derivative, and distinguishing commercial operators from speculators (who should be more limited in leverage).

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

ESSENCE OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

2009-10-17T03:33:00.000-07:00

For millennia, the STATE controlled the currency. Now, though, most of the currency is controlled by a few private individuals, the bankers. The fractional reserve system is set up that way. This is actually a devolution of civilization.

And it happened before: the French Ancient Regime let private individuals be in charge of taxation, the Fermiers Generaux ("General Farmers"). This led directly to the French revolution of 1789. I have developed this theme, and many related issues, on my sites.

Now, again, this has got to stop. Bankers cannot just create the currency, and lend it to their friends and themselves, with the connivance of the government, artificially boosting GDP, joining insult to injury, has is the case now. Enough is enough.

Now, of course, this is not all what is wrong with the economy. There is a global economic crisis due to globalization (a form of re-colonization), one caused by increasing energy and ecological problems, and one caused by insufficient technological and scientific progress, considering the piling up of problems, and one caused by the related dissemination of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

FRAYING IN AFFRAYING AFGHANISTAN

2009-09-26T05:15:00.000-07:00

Bob Herbert correctly notice in the NYT: "The difference between the public’s take on Afghanistan and that of the nation’s top leadership is both stunning and ominous. A clash is coming."

As I have argued on my sites, to win a war, one needs first to know what one is fighting for. Or then have an immense military superiority. We do not have the later: scaling up what the French did in Algeria to the populations, we would need 500,000 [# of French soldiers] times 36 [population Afghanistan] divided by 6 [population Algerians at the time], namely three million men.

The French won militarily in Algeria, and, although "Algeria is France" (as used to be said), they left. They were just plain tired of waging a conflict, and argue about superstition.

So are we going to send three million men to dominate 36 million Afghans? So we can lose a few years later?

Unlikely.

Obama does not know what he is doing in Afghanistan, as shown by his completely self contradictory statements about Islam there (which is, according to him, and the fact of the Afghan constitution, what we are defending there, he means, what he views as the good Islam, except he does not like the law about raping women, and forcing them to enjoy it officially...)

The drain of this grotesque war on treasure, morals, morality, and logical coherence, let alone lives and limbs cannot be sustained...

As I have argued, the war is waged not because of Al Qaeda, or the Taliban: these are just pretexts. But the truth can only be left unsaid...

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

PECK ON BECK NOT

2009-09-26T01:35:00.000-07:00

Krugman observes that: "I’d say that Feldstein was channeling Glenn Beck, except that since the Feldstein piece came first, it’s the other way around. So as I said, maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on Mr. Beck."

[Marty Feldstein, a well known economist has been going around, saying, and writing in prestigious editorials that one could not afford to fight the greenhouse effect.]

Beck had an excellent piece on the influence of big bankers, in particular Goldman Sachs, on the political process, in particular the White House. He was standing at the blackboard, and drew an elaborated diagram, which was correct, as far as I knew.

I also know that it required a lot of courage to do so. In my own microcosme, I was harassed and punished by bankers-with-bonuses, just because I emitted similar truths (they threatened and insulted me through email and the Internet, and got me banned from websites). I had to pinch myself to observe that was really happening, and not just a nightmare.

So I can understand the sort of risk that Beck took by drawing that diagram, and going on a long piece about plutocrats. He got many bonus points from me then.

I can understand that Beck wants to depict himself as a clown to divert attention from his grave objections to an ancient regime which is going straight towards the wall of the tsunami of rising seas… He can always justify himself by saying later that he said whatever, being a clown, and thus innocent of any gravitas versus big bankers with offices in the White House (Rahm Emanuel, and various Golman officers...)

Nevermind that Beck is ironical about global warming when it snows in New York. It is an amusing contrast. It is to scientists to explain, and pound down on, the point that the warming is mostly concentrated in the polar regions, and that there is the Achilles Heel of the entire climate: if you bust the frig, the temps are going to shoot up. And the seas will follow…

PA

WHEN OUTRAGE IS NOT ENOUGH...

2009-09-20T04:59:00.000-07:00

PLAIN OLD RAGE IS RECOMMENDED...

In "Even Glenn Beck Is Right Twice a Day", Frank Rich (NYT, Sunday Sept. 20, 2009) declares that: President Obama — and our political system — are being tested by a populist rage that is no less real for being shouted by a demagogue from Fox.

When the People has good reason to be enraged, does that mean the the slightly pejorative "populist rage" should be used?

Well, what is being tested is systems of thought that are erroneous.

Clinton, Larry Summers and his fellow conspirators at Goldman Sachs, the White House, and the like, dismantled (crucial parts of) Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Congress work elaborated in 1933 to keep the financial exploiters at bay, once and for all. These are the people that ought to be denounced. And Beck denounced them (a bit). That's good.

Anybody exploiting so called racial differences to self advance, or not, is playing the racist card, that is also a fact one should bear in mind. One can be funny about it as Lula, the president of Brazil, has been, and that is sort of tolerable, perhaps even necessary, sometimes.

Anyway, people should talk about \"race\" where it counts. Such as: are the budget cuts in California racist and pro-plutocratic? But the brush with which one paints things has to be precise enough to write something meaningful. That Beck does occasionally, and it's hard to do.

So the problem is at the White House, and in Congress, not Beck's studio. Beck does the job that is needed, calling a cat a cat, and the thief, even a large one, a thief.

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

BLAME THE CAUSE.

2009-09-07T12:59:00.000-07:00

[Published on the Roger Cohen blog, NYT, September 6, 2009].
***

The Egyptian cultural minister responded in 2008, in the following fashion to a deputy of the Egyptian parliament who was alarmed that Israeli books could be introduced into the Alexandria Library: “Burn these books; if there are any there, I will myself burn them in front of you”?
Now he is leading candidate for UNESCO, to the alarm of Claude Lanzmann (author of the documentary "Shoah"), Bernard-Henri Lévy (philosopher) and Elie WieselNobel (prize winner in literature). They want "to prevent the irreparable".
But are they barking up the wrong tree?
***

When confronting a single statement, or just a few statements, one has to be cautious about the context that brought them up. This is what happens when people joke: people utter statements that make no sense in a more global context, and the logical incoherence gives pleasure (probably a way evolution has found to encourage the imagination, the source of mental insight).

But statements that make no sense in a more general, but intended context, can happen in other situations too, and not just to amuse, but to instruct directly. Maybe Hosny was trying to shake things up, while giving a few rhetoric morsels to opponents. That is what his "solemn" excuses seem to indicate.

"Anti-Semitism" has come to mean "Anti-Judaism". "Anti-Judaism" originated with Christianism, the so called Catholic Orthodoxy of emperor Constantine and many of his imperial, superstitious, fanatical and extremely atrocious successors.

At the time, the Catholics were busy killing everybody they disagreed with, and they disagreed with whoever had the slightest different philosophy about anything. The Jews barely escaped with their lives as a culture and religion, others were so thoroughly exterminated, nearly nobody knows their names (Arians, Nestorians, Gnostics, etc...). Three centuries later, the concept of fanatical Anti-Judaism was picked up by those who wrote the Qur'an (a bunch of military men under Caliph Uthman, ~ 645 CE).

The Qur'an is violently against the "Jews". OK, not as ferociously as it is for the extermination of some other categories of unbelievers. But I do not see Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy protesting against the blatant hatred of the Jews in the Qur'an. Why? All the more troubling since Adolf Hitler expressed his admiration for, and knowledge of Islam many times (let alone made more than friends with the Mufti of Jerusalem!)

It seems clear to me that, as long as the Qur'an will be viewed as "holy", all what is inside will be viewed as "holy". Many statements in the Qur'an can be interpreted as calling for the death of Jews and saying they refused God, and Muhammad, and are unbelievers, etc... All these categories of thinkers the Qur'an calls to kill. Shocking but true.

I know this sort of observation on the text of a superstition is viewed as "racist" by people with little brainpower. But it is not anymore racist than observing that the Christian superstition's highest authorities tortured to death millions of Jews and other "heretics" over the centuries. In that sense the catholic Hitler was just the bouquet final of attempted Jewish holocausts(and Hitler was, indeed, not so discreetly supported by the Pope himself).

The hadiths of Muhammad, another sacred text of Islam go even further than the Qur'an: "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. 'O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him'".(Sahih al-Bukhari 4:52:177) This hadith has been quoted countless times, and it has become a part of the charter of Hamas.

So let those lions of justice and courage, Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy, lay the blame where it mostly lays. Differently from Hosny, they are better protected, so we expect more from them.
***

Patrice Ayme
***

[A much longer and elaborated version, filling in a lot of savory details, will hopefully be put on:
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/]

THE ROAD TO CARBONIFEROUS HELL.

2009-09-04T13:53:00.000-07:00

Sarkozy (the president of France, would I add for the cognitively challenged) declared yesterday that, as far as he was concerned, as long as unemployment was going up, the crisis was still worsening.

The real crisis was well started under Clinton: an increasingly unbalanced, unsustainable economy, with rising unemployment in real jobs (I know that Reagan said that being a shoe shiner was as honorable, as real a job as being a rocket scientist, but that is only illustrative of Reagan’s lack of grasp of what constitutes an economy).

That Americans are getting enraged maybe a good, necessary, although counterintuitive first step. Americans are reduced to rage because rage lessens pain (a scientific study just came out showing that cursing measurably reduced pain). It is the first step towards revolt: cursing helps.

The French have long learned to express their own rage creatively. It is not so dumb; since, in France, the higher ups can be seized at any moment by the vengeful People, they think more carefully at the broad scheme of things. Hence Sarkozy’s many correct insights. The French government made a deal with the French population that it would confront Obama with an ultimatum about banksters’ bonuses.

Of course, many American bankers will scoff: what can France do? Well, France will introduce a carbon tax in 2010. That sounds i nnocent enough. But then the European Union will have to follow. And then of course it could be applied to imports. China is probably guessing this, and making a massive move towards renewables, using the might of her communist command and control of her capitalist free economy.

Applying the carbon tax to imports will be a powerful blow against the international plutocracy that seems to animate the USA as a living skeleton inside. Indeed the delocalized American industry in nice locales such as China will be struck by ruinous taxes (as deserved). It will of course help the European industrial base (still mostly in Europe, thanks to vociferous European protesters).

At this point the USA could be put on the ropes: its plutocracy would be collapsing, its industrial base will have long disappeared, and the worldwide carbon tax will strike hard all heavy users of carbon, including air travel. Only the Hamish will look smart. OK, it’s 10 years down the road to hell, but the situation is clear: since the USA did not want to clean its act, it will be cleaned whether it cooperates, or not.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

WHAT AMERICAN HEALTH CARE IS BEST AT.

2009-09-02T23:17:00.000-07:00

Health care is a huge profit center for the hyper rich in the USA. Warren Buffet made personally 8 billion dollars from health insurance at some point. Still, Obama called him his "friend", many times over. Does Obama want everybody to emulate Buffet and divert funds from health care to obscene profits so as to be able to buy oneself a fleet of private jets, as Warren Buffet did? With friends like that do you get a jet too?

In the USA, all too often, when people make big money, they are viewed as right, deep, just and altruistic.

So Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama got hundreds of thousands of dollars from a hospital, although they are not trained in medicine or hospital administration. In a country such as France, the public health insurance system, which watches over the cost of the entire medical system, would have sued them for corruption.

But in the USA, they made big money, so they are just, right, deep, and incarnate American health care: a way to make big bucks for the few, the best, the wisest, and most altruistic. And Valerie Jarrett is there in the front lines, with her vision of health care for everybody.

No doubt that involves paying more so she can get more funds for a bigger mansion on Martha's Vineyard for herself. In other countries health spending is for health, in the USA it is for the rich to live like kings on Martha's Vineyard.

PA

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

CONSPIRING TO DISTRACT? OR WORSE?

2009-09-01T04:58:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times: "A new report by the top commander in Afghanistan detailing the deteriorating situation there confronts President Obama with the politically perilous decision of whether to deepen American involvement in the eight-year-old war amid shrinking public support at home."

Politically perilous? Is "politics" all there ever is? What about morally devastating, philosophically self defeating and strategically erroneous?

The war in Afghanistan is so blatantly absurd at this point that one cannot escape a feeling that it is a deliberate distraction, among other things. Another possibility, explored here, is that some deeper computation is at work, and it has nothing to do with Islamist terrorists.

For example Obama, a past drug user himself, makes a big deal about the planting in Afghanistan of plants that can be used for drugs. As if it were his business.

This is a new height in hypocrisy.Poppy planting is legal, for medicinal purposes, all around the world, including Turkey, France and Australia.

This war is going nowhere nice. The fact that it is going nowhere allows to justify lots of military spending, though... Having a full grown man such as Obama in need of handlers to tell him which fight to engage in is pathetic.

Why so much bravado in Afghanistan, and so little with bankers and health care vultures?

Now, of course, there may be deeper reasons to stay forever in Afghanistan. Such as being in the front line when the unavoidable thermonuclear war between india and Pakistan occurs, 15 years down the drain... But then it may be more clever, democratic and civilizationally progressive to say it, and to talk about that. Instead the present strategy of taking deliberately erroneous decisions so that the war last another 15 years is a freely chosen tactic to make a bad situation worse.

Peoples, in Europe and America, may not approve much longer...

Patrice Ayme

[A more elaborated version of this post will be found on patriceayme.wordpress.com]

THINKING IS A MUST, CARICATURE IS NOT.

2009-09-01T01:03:00.000-07:00

(In my not so humble opinion) FALSELY REPORTING THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE DOES NOT HELP, BE IT ON THE RIGHT, OR ON THE LEFT:
***

Paul Krugman offered the following opinion on his blog:

"Back in 2004 I looked at TV reports on health care plans, and found not a single segment actually explaining the candidates’ plans. This time the WaPo ombud looks at his own paper’s reporting, and it’s not much better.

Why does this happen? I suspect several reasons.

1. It’s easier to research horse-race stuff. To report on policy, a reporter has to master the policy issues fairly well. That’s not easy...

...Newsweek’s Sharon Begley wrote a piece about what actually is and isn’t in Obamacare, and got mail from readers denouncing her and wishing her an early death. As I pointed out the other day, I’m getting a lot of hate mail — and I mean obscenities, death wishes, and all that, not strongly worded disagreements — for writing about Swiss health care and budget arithmetic. Much safer to report on ups and downs in the conventional wisdom.

The upshot, of course, is that we’re having a crucial national policy debate in which the great bulk of the news coverage tells people nothing at all about the policy issues."
***

I do agree with the overall gists of Paul's arguments. Nevertheless, in the haste to depict opponents to (some aspects?) of putative health care proposals as bad, the proponents of health care reform (whatever is meant by that)are also dishonest. An example is provided here. I sent the commentary below to Krugman's blog, very early on. Now the blog had the kindness to publish me many times. But not this time. Why? Well, you judge. Apparently, being caricatural is a must, and the New York Times is firmly decided to protect me from directing abrasive criticism against the presumed hero of health care. Here is my unelected comment:
***

I have appreciated Sharon Begley very much, ever since she was covering science at the Wall Street Journal. I bought her book, long ago. But her Newsweek piece is the first one I have seen of her that is content empty. For example, I know that Sarah Palin is whatever she is, and to remind me of that does not advance the debate.

But Obama has no plan we can see. Slogans are not a plan. There are 3 or 4 bills in Congress, none of them with Obama's signature on it.

The Grand Ma-does-not-need-a-hip talk was started by him, Obama. In the New York Times (May 2009).

Of course republicans were going to jump on the grand mother does-not-need-care issue. Of course Obama could predict that. And of course laying supine as republicans ran all over him was not going to improve any chance at health reform.

So the question has long been: what does Obama want? Staying friend with the health insurance king Warren Buffet?

As I stated many times, it ought to have taken 3 days to boost and improve Medicare, and pass the legislation (with the existing democratic majorities). Further tinkering could have squeezed the private life insurers' abuse. It would have been easy to find an egregious case resulting in death, and for the government to sue for homicide. That would make juriprudence, squeezing the insurers for-profit lifestyle out. Medicare could have grown.

Oops, I forgot that "friend" Warren would certainly not have been happy, with such an easy outcome...

If we do not want to do just horse race reporting, we have to stop treating Obama as a horse. Surely, he is more intelligent than that. But then how come so dumb in health care? After being so dumb with the banks? Not enough hay in the old barn?

Patrice Ayme
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

QUESTION AUTHORITY, DON'T BEG FOR IT.

2009-08-28T13:03:00.000-07:00

A question frequently asked: "Do you have a bio somewhere on the web that could be read?"

There is a crying need for intellectuals to constitute a worldwide network. We are living in unique times, when good thinking can be broadcasted to the entire planet, as never before.

Naturally people searching for a better grasp on reality, look for authority, but that is more than a bit self contradictory. Authority is so yesterday, because, as long as there is progress, authority comes short, and this is good.

Denying authority is related to the biography question. I deliberately do not provide with a bio. I am motivated by thinking, and the product of my thoughts ought to stand on its own, even if I am small and ridiculous, green with yellow spots, hermaphrodite, young, old, of Aztec descent, or a Tagalong speaker... I am tired, and I would like other people to be tired from the nationalism, religionism, sexism, ageism, etc. (Also there is a security aspect: somewhat incredibly, I was assaulted with lethal violence more than once. Contrarily to my friend Obama, I am not provided with bodyguards)

To get to the truth, it is necessary to avoid arguments based on authority. There is a number of reasons for this:

1) Yesterday's glory does not reveal necessarily tomorrow's truth. In the most important, cases, quite the opposite; yesterday's certainty is, all too often, tomorrow's lie.

2) Having satisfied previous authority, or authorities, is generally the way to become an authority, in turn. Feynman contemptfully noticed that the business of deciding who would become an authority was the Academy of Science's main activity. Then he resigned.

Those authorities may, or may not, be endowed with higher values. For example if a head of state elevates someone to a position of authority, that does not mean generally it is deserved, or even that the head of state ought to be an authority. Even Ernst Roehm contested Hitlers' authority in the matter of Nazism (Hitler therefore visited Roehm in the cell he had imprisoned him in, and shot him to death, a sure way to terminate the socialist interpretation of national-socialism.).

3) There is a psychological characteristic in human being, a desire to be economical, a trick from billions of years of evolution. Some call it lazyness. Brain work consists into brain rebuilding, and thus is energy intensive. Believing saves energy, comparatively to verifying things. Thus people often prefer instead to believe vast mental schemes rather than checking where they logically came from. So people are drawn to live at the feet of authority rather than in a dialogue with thinking. Both forms contradict each other, and one has to chose, whether to become, emotionally, a believer rather than a criticizer.

To believe with the heart is often the best choice, but then the next question is which kind of heart. The naive and touching heart Pascal found solace with, of the haughty mien of the Athenians at the pinnacle of their power?

To destroy the authority argument, Socrates used to say that he knew nothing, a polite way to say that they knew nothing. I am a bit more honest, and will humbly recognize that I know plenty of things. But I will not publish a bio. Lest it looks authoritative, I guess...

My way to destroy the authority argument is just to argue. People have to learn to distinguish between the plausible, and what is not so. A form of meta learning.

PA

WHY GDP IS UP WHILE EMPLOYMENT IS DOWN

2009-08-21T13:53:00.000-07:00

From Paul Krugman's excellent blog (August 21, 2009):

"Barara Kiviat asks, is this a recovery or isn’t it? The answer is yes.

I’ve been pointing out for a long time — well before the crisis hit full steam — that recoveries ain’t what they used to be. Basically, the standard definition of a recovery is that it’s when GDP starts to rise; but “jobless recoveries”, in which unemployment keeps worsening long after GDP has turned around, have become the new normal. Bill Clinton was able to run on the economy, stupid, well into an alleged economic recovery; the 2001 recession formally ended in Nov. of that year, but it didn’t feel like a recovery until the second half of 2003.

I really don’t understand why anyone is surprised that it’s happening again."
***

Here is my own take on it, to explain that apparently strange phenomenon:

As the hyper rich gets ever hyper, more and more of the rise in GDP is absorbed by them. So, recovery after recovery, the hyper rich climb up the ladder of owning more and more of everything. This is in part caused by the ever greater "efficiency" of the economy, meaning the decent jobs of yesteryear are gone to developing nations. Every down cycle is a pretext to augment said "efficiency", and sending more jobs away, or diminishing their cost.

Hence the effect that is observed, of recovering GDP ever more accompanied by sluggish recovery in employment and its quality.

It would be good to look at median income instead of GDP to evaluate the depth and nature of economic crises. My bet is that, averaged over all and any twenty year periods, the present crisis of median income would reveal itself to be greater than the one centered around the 1930s...

This will go on, until it is understood by the People who vote that plutocracy is global, although law is only local. Thus global plutocracy can "navigate" (a concept Barack Obama loves), around local law, just as any long wavelength wave can navigate around small isolated obstacles...

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

AWE, NOT GDP!

2009-08-20T13:20:00.000-07:00

WHY THE USA IS IN A GREAT DEPRESSION NOW.
(Although the upper class will get out of it in a few months!)
***

It is high time to use more sophisticated measures than GDP.

In particular GDP does not consider efficiency (traffic jams augment it). I proposed to use AWE (Absolute Worth Energy).

Meanwhile it may be good to consider the median income. It has been going down for a very long time in the USA, on a real basis (including the inflation in the cost of everything, not just the CPI). Looked at it that way, on a 20 year period, the present times compare unfavorably with any period centered around the 1930s.

In this light, the great depression is now.

Globalization without global law will lead to convergence of the income distribution, on a worldwide basis, thus the USA's wealth pyramid will look more like India, in the long run, than that of the 1950s America.

King Louis XV of France used to say: "Apres moi, le deluge!" After me, the flood... He did not care. Plutocrats tend to reason that way, because all the money to them now is the balm they use for their absence of worthy passions. The vision thing is no tool they enjoy, as it would reveal them to be empty inside.

"No drama Obama" converges towards the exact same psychological profile... Meanwhile the society and economy is losing its essential substance, California, for example throwing, literally the baby out, rather than the putrid bath...

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

DEBATE ON FREE WILL MODIFIED.

2009-08-20T11:50:00.000-07:00

We do not know whether electrons have free will.

It looks as if they could. I do not believe they do, but it looks as if they could, from all what we presently know.

In the famous 2 slit experiment, the quintessential Quantum experiment, electrons have a more or less greater probability to land here or there, but, within those expansive bounds, it looks as if they do what they please...

The age old debate on free will has thus been modified. Before we can address the problem of human free will, we have to address the problem of electronic free will, because our body contains 10,000 trillion trillions electrons.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

FASCISM AT HARVARD.

2009-08-18T06:06:00.000-07:00

WHEN HARVARD PROFESSORS PLAGIARIZE FROM ADOLF HITLER HIMSELF.
***

Paul Krugman in his blog, August 17, 2009:

"I really had no intention of writing more about Niall Ferguson. Regular readers may recall that he wrote an article in the Financial Times that began,

President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th president of the US …"
***

OK. I have bought some of Ferguson's books, in hardback form, as they came out. I also have a serious problem with Professor Ferguson (and, by extension, Harvard university).

The following was sent to Krugman's blog, and I am trying to write a much expanded version for http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/. But days have only so many hours...
***

Ferguson is a historian in the sense that Hitler was a historian. The former follows the later closely. Ferguson’s thesis about WWI is that it would have been better if Britain had stayed out of the war. It is not new: Russel invented it, was condemned to spent 18 months in jail during WWI for advertizing it. Hitler had been given guarantees, by Ferguson-like British traitors, that Britain would stay out of France’s offensive maneuvers in 1939. He could not believe it when Britain joined France, and declared war to the Nazis. Apparently, not enough Brits had been taught by Ferguson-like professors.

This thesis, that Britain ought to have betrayed her sister democracy, France, is grotesque and deeply offensive to the spirit of democracy.

The day after Imperial fascist Germany had attacked several democracies deliberately (becoming the first country to fire a shot in WWI), Earl Grey, the British foreign minister, delivered an excellent discourse to the Commons explaining why Britain had to get into the war. It is not that Britain was anxious to go to war, foaming at the mouth. As the Secretary of State for War, Field-Marshal Kitchener, pointed out with relish: "I am proud to stand with such courageous men as my colleagues in the Cabinet. They have no Army and have declared war against the mightiest military nation in the world."

It is no mystery that Imperial fascist Germany had engaged in a holocaust in Namibia (led by Goering, father of Herman). White supremacists loved fascist Germany just for this general inclination of being willing to free vast swathes of the planet for the white “Western” man of the Germanic variety, after exterminating the natives.

Hitler pursued that work. Ferguson is sad, because, according to him, the West, by not adopting fascism, has degenerated. All people of the same persuasion will find this sort of “historical work” very good. I hold, though, that this mentality got 100 million people killed, among other nefarious effects.

By the same standard, I will suggest that the same sort people who find Ferguson so good should consider the remarkable historical work of Adolf Hitler (this is meant to be ironical), as found in “Mein Kampf”.
That such people are allowed to teach the young in the most prestigious places is testimony to the power of plutocracy, and the fact that it is racist and fascist at heart.

So, let me repeat: it is not France and Britain, the two and only very large democracies in Europe, which created the terrible war of 1914-1945. France (with Belgium, Luxembourg, Russia) was attacked by the fascists, by surprise. Everybody knew that Britain and France had been in the process of getting reunited and operating as a unit for a century, leading them to joint military operations (invasions of China and Russia, among others). This close relationship had crystallized more recently with an explicit alliance (”Entente Cordiale”).

What created the First World War was the fascist, racist spirit that penetrated imperial fascist Germany.

That spirit had not been crushed by WWI. So it revived right away. The failure of the intervening Weimar republic was partly due to the fact that it conceded all the main points to the fascist opposition, preferring to accuse France, and Britain having chosen the wrong side. Much better to create gigantic inflation, rather than standing on principle in the internal German debate. (This is a bit similar to Barack Obama conceding to Big Pharma and eschewing the public plan before even starting negotiations on health care.)

Ferguson says that civilization would have been improved by accepting that this fascist spirit triumphed. It is a misunderstanding about what advances civilization most. Civilization profits more from democracy, not oligarchy. Civilization was made to benefit from the mindwork, and physical work of the many. But then, Ferguson is an oligarchic product (elite private school, etc.), and therein his bread and butter. He does what he is paid for.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

HEALTH SCARE?

2009-08-08T23:16:00.000-07:00

GIVEN ENOUGH CORRUPTION, A MORAL BLACK HOLE FORMS...
***

FRANK RICH wonders: "Is Obama Punking Us?" As Rich abstracts it: "While it’s unlikely that the chorus of President Obama’s most strident doomsayers will be proven right, there is growing cause for concern that the president is not the reformer he promised to be."And the NYT invited me to "Share your thoughts." So here it is:
***

The day after his election, Obama went to work at a hedge fund. At this point, I had a sinking feeling: Obama did not even try to hide the truth about himself. That brazen display was right in the middle of the collapse of finance, most of it caused by HEDGE FUND LIKE ACTIVITIES by a handful of major bankers and a few traders in conspiracies such as AIG and Goldman Sachs. These activities involved enormous leverage of public money, thanks to the fact that banks are mysteriously allowed by the government to create money, and give it to whoever they want (surprisingly, they start with themselves and their friends).

Then Obama brought in the biggest Goldman Sachs team that ever was, the Rubin team. It had been busy, under Clinton, demolishing Roosevelt's great financial architecture (The Banking Act of 1933). After bearing fruits, and receiving their rich rewards under Bush, Summers and company were back at work, apparently to push things much further. This time money was directly taken from the People, no need for subtilities anymore.

And here we are, a year later. Summers was already, de facto, in power a year ago, all what was done in the meantime, the 24,000 billion dollars given, lent or promised to their corrupt friends in finance (what Obama calls the "financial system", in a surrealistic touch), was accomplished in accord with Rubin, and the Rubin team. Geithner was already second in command behind Paulson, when they acted on their Goldman Sacks plot, destroying Lehman (instead of nationalizing it), Goldman's competitor, while setting up a machination with AIG.

So we are here a year later, and the People has been enslaved with higher spending and borrowing, and there is strictly nothing to show for it which is positive. The thieves are getting tax payer money for their mansions, private jets and tax heavens. And Obama celebrates this as "saving the financial system".
Without debate, Obama expanded the war in Afghanistan. Never mind that he is sending people to die for a Muslim constitution there (a blatant violation of the separation of church and state).

Obama now says cost has to be contained in the health care system. But his wife Michelle, and friend, Valerie Jarrett, were sitting on an hospital board, raking up a fortune. They are just lawyers. They are not doctors of medicine, just lawyers. In a country such as France, they would be on trial for corruption. In, the USA, they sit in the White House, looking pretty.

The spouse of the ex-mayor of Paris got $30,000 for a 40 page report; last week she got condemned to 9 months in jail, on the ground that $30,000 for 40 pages was obvious corruption. Obama and Jarrett, named by politicians through what would be called in France political "influence trafficking", got millions playing doctors on a hospital board, and then people wonder why health care is so expensive in the USA? Just put one Jarrett and one Obama per hospital board, and you break the health care system.

Two other advisers of Obama on health care are calling for cuts in health care. No, they are not accusing corruption and lawyers paid by corrupt hospitals to play doctors, and raking millions in their uneducated hands.

One of Obama's advisers says that health care cost too much, because there is too much research, and he proposes to cut back on new treatments, and research. He claims two-thirds of the augmentation of cost comes from there. New medical technology. But that was always the case, so what is he truly saying?

The other health adviser of Obama is outright saying that he wants to give medical treatment according to a "priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated". He gave lots of statements about refusing treatment to infant and older people. No doubt that this will improve the mortality rates of infants, which are already abysmal in the USA, all the way down to Hades.

Even the Nazis never dared say anything of the sort in public. I am not exaggerating: this Ezekiel Emanuel made an outright attack against the Hippocratic oath. His brother the Chief of Staff today said that progressives were "f..king stupid" to not see how right all of this was. (Rahm the Chief made 16 million from a bank in 2 years: his children will survive the cuts.)

Killing children for money, as Emanuel proposes to do, is also a form of racism, because no doubt those who the plutocratic system has made filthy rich will have no trouble paying doctors to save their babies.

A week ago, I was laughing with everybody when a gentleman insisted that "government takes its hands out of my Medicare". But now I have encountered Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. Dr. Emanuel would have done better to stay discrete and silent, like his predecessor, Dr. Mengele. And I am not laughing anymore. Emanuel makes Rubin look like a humanist, and Goldman Sacks like a charity. Once again, and to my dismay, the warning signs are there.

Details, with plenty of quotes of the "health" advisers, will be put on my site ASAP. I do not know why this is all happening. Obama talks the talk, but he walks into Hades. Things such as these have happened in history before. Let's not forget that Mussolini had a long career as a socialist, before getting to power. Once there he tried to fight Hitler. In the end he finished as the exact opposite of all he had initially claimed he stood for. Hitler himself claimed to be a socialist (but, secretly he was the exact opposite, and he was financed, organized and supported by some of the richest families in Germany and the USA).

Who is financing Obama, already? Well, if you believe it's the small people, as the propaganda has it, you may have dementia. And people with dementia do not get health care, in the "complete lives system" of the good Doctor Emanuel. Your prognostic is not good.
***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

ANGER WITH A CAUSE IS REASON WITH A FUTURE.

2009-08-06T23:36:00.000-07:00

DO NOT SAY THAT ANGER IS BAD, THINK ABOUT WHY THEY GOT ANGRY.
***

Paul Krugman hopefully opines that:"A close look at recent protesters indicates that cynical political operators are exploiting cultural and racial anxiety in the health care reform debate."
Unfortunately, there is much more to it, and Obama and his happy crew can only blame themselves. I am 100% for universal health care, but these leaders are doing everything wrong, and the People sense it. Let me explain a bit.
***

Well, human beings do not act out of logical chains only. Those logical chains (neuron inter connects: axons, etc.) are built through glial activity. Glial cells are more emotional. They direct neuronal (hence logical) growth. Emotions first, diffusely, then logics to give it a skeleton.

So emotions build up first. And Obama, unfortunately, did a lot of things to make both his supporters and his opponents angry.

On health care we have Dr. Emanuel, the brother of the Emanuel who made 16 million dollars from a bank, between two political jobs, in 2 years. That second Emanuel is Obama’s Chief of Staff. Emanuel the brother is a doctor . He apparently uttered talk which was clearly intent on rationing the elderly (compare with Bush, who brought medical drugs to the elderly). There are no words to qualify how despicable such talk is.

Obama had no problem promising those who destroyed the economy 24,000 billion dollars, so that they could keep their haughty commandeering of American destiny, and giant incomes. But then Obama said health care had to be fully paid for. Although, once subtracted some present give away to private companies, the Obama plan would cost only 50 billion dollars a year, or so.

Obama has no problem borrowing like a drunken sailor so that his Muslims can win over the “extremist” Muslims he does not like in Afghanistan. Never mind that he spends 5 billion a week, and that the war will be lost. Killing Afghans should be free, curing American should be expensive.

I am for universal health care, as all really civilized countries have. It's indeed a quation of civilization. But, for Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama, it was a question of money. Big money, for themselves. Big influence, for themselves. Taking care of others? Perhaps. But of themselves? Surely, big time. Never mind that they were not qualified.

France, full of elderly citizens, and attached to the concept of humanity, would never limit care for the elderly (I saw this with many elderly members of my family). Any politician uttering anything that way, or in the way of reducing care, would be out of politics in France immediately. Even if the president (there would be riots marching on the presidency, which would probably burn down, and the police would not interfere).

I am thoroughly familiar with the French and US health care system, my best friend is a US doctor. But the US system stinks to high heavens, and it stinks of money. And what do we see around Obama? People who, although not doctors, and having no medical background, got paid enormously to sit on private hospital boards.

Such people, in France, would be on trial. In the USA, they sit in the White House. So people are angry? Well, may be they sense something French justice has learned to recognize.
***

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

AN IDEA AMERICAN CLUNKERS CAN CASH ON

2009-08-05T22:52:00.000-07:00

WHY NOT GET REAL SMART, AND DO AS IF OTHER PEOPLE HAD BRAINS TOO?

Cash for clunkers is an old FRENCH idea. It was used several times in France over the last decade, with great success. It's used presently, with lots of variants (primes for very low CO2 emission cars, for cars more than 10 years old, etc...). The present clunker French program is supposed to expire at the end of 2009.

Cash for clunkers was long derided as typical French "Colbertism", or "dirigisme" (Colbert was a famous French finance and industry minister of the 17th century; some of the capitalist firms he helped then are still around today, and profitable, such as the giant Saint Gobain).

German governments long detested the cash for clunkers idea, viewing it as a French crutch, and other Europeans tried to block it as unfair business practice. This year, though, with its car industry dying, Germany adopted it with elan, splurging with enormous payments for every single vehicle. It was a resounding success: the German car industry is reviving.

This brings us to a more general point: why does not the government of the USA just study what is being done in Europe, on the other side of the pond, especially by the big countries?

In Europe the big countries themselves spend a huge amount of effort trying to duplicate successful strategies of smaller countries.

There is no shame in using others' solutions. There is shame in thinking the USA has it all figured out, though. The USA could gather enormous inspiration, by just studying French society and government in detail (France, for a number of reasons, including the long republican and revolutionary traditions in common, is the closest, more easily imitable model for the USA.)

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

HEALTH: FRANCE VERSUS NIXON.

2009-07-31T07:47:00.000-07:00

FAIR HEALTH CARE OUGHT TO BE A DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTION.

Justice is an institution. It is separated from other branches of government. In theory at least (but not really since Obama has been interfering with Holder's sword of justice).

France has the best health care in the world, according to international evaluations. Friends of the American health care private profiteering scheme scoff that the French are subject to their government. It will come as a surprise to typically misinformed Americans that private health care insurance covers more than 90% of French subjects. Proportionally more than in the USA!

Not just that, but French insurance companies are doing great: one them, AXA, not content with owning a giant tower in... Manhattan, is building the highest one in Paris, as if there never had been a crash, and so it is for AXA's profits.

So what is going on?

The French "PUBLIC HEALTH" system functions as a single payer for all basic health care, with greater efficiency than a private system, because it does not have to pay managers and owners handsome amounts of money to keep them more interested by the health of their citizens than by exploiting workers in China.

The French "Public Health" negotiates with pharmaceutical companies as a single dealer. The companies make excellent profits, because they do not have huge marketing costs. Their financial maneuvers are watched over, so they can use their capital to make research, not fortunes for third parties. And so on.

The French Public Health actually is self regulated, and is, de facto, an independent democratic institution. It's the government, only in the sense that the justice system is the government.

And what of private insurance in all this?

Well, because basic dental crowns, as reimbursed by "Public Health" do not have that translucent quality you can get from a real artiste, and because, if the doctor prescribes going to a four star resort, and, considering that the Public Health system is cutting down on those... then private insurance steps in.

There is nothing anti-American about the French Public Health system. But there is definitively something anti-American about the present health care plutocracy in the USA. And no wonder: Nixon created it. With tax dollars.

Much more details on my site...http://patriceayme.wordpress.com
***

Patrice Ayme

HEALTH CARE IN PROFIT CONTEXT ALWAYS?

2009-07-27T14:06:00.000-07:00

WHEN PROFITS IN THE POCKETS DO NOT PROFIT HEALTH AND MINDS:

Interesting: Here we had on CNBC, Maria Bartiromo (the mile a minute talking head with partially eye occulting hairdo, friend and party to the plutocracy) interviewing the head of the "Cleveland Clinic" .

The later clinic is one of these private contraptions given as an example of excellent private health care for the People. With a third interviewee in tow, Maria and the private head concluded in a chorus that a "public plan" would kill the private sector by offering lower premiums. That, in turn would kill innovation in new treatments and drugs, they all took turns to howl to the sky.
Maria led the howling about the USA having the best health care, the best drugs, the best everything, that the Public would savagely tear apart, etc... The Res-Publica, the Public Thing as a threat to goodness...

This is all the wind of lucre howling... This can be pointed at quantitatively by looking at new drug production.

The creation of drugs in the last twenty years ought to have followed the productivity of computers, and being multiplied by hundreds (the potential for new drugs from natural products is known to be in the millions: countless natural biological products are known to have very strong, very targeted physiological effects, meaning they could be made into drugs). Instead it was divided by three. coming down to a trickle. The production of new antibiotics outright stopped for a decade (now it's starting again a tiny bit). As I pointed on "Too Sick To Care?" (patriceayme.wordpress.com), this has been caused by pharmaceutical companies spending most of their disposable capital in financial maneuvers.

Graphs could be produced, with drug development spending plummeting, while financial maneuvers spending soared, in a zero sum game.

So here we had the example everybody brandishes, and Obama himself brandishes, the Cleveland Clinic, and the discourse was blatantly unbalanced toward the plutocratic, for profit context. No care context. All profit context. And to sugar pill it all, ludicrous chest thumping about the health care of the USA being the best, so far.

As long as it was just having 50 million Americans without health insurance, and many others being driven to bankruptcy from their health problems (as health failure is the # 1 cause of that), it ought to have been fine for the hyper rich. After all they are not known for their altruism, and they were not the ones dying or getting morbid from lack of potential care. Or so they thought.

But now even those rarefied few should get alarmed: the loss of potential improvement in health, even for the plutocracy itself, is enormous, and getting greater every year. The statistics are clear: I am sure that even Paris Hilton could teach them.
***

Patrice Ayme
wordpress.com

THEY SINK, THEREFORE THEY CARE NOUGHT.

2009-07-24T16:34:00.000-07:00

(Published by NYT, 23 July 2009)
*

The talking heads in the media have whined. Not enough "folksy anecdotes" in the analysis of health care during Obama's conference on health care, for them? So they claim.

There is a deeper problem. And that is that enforced stupidity has become an instrument of deliberate oppression.

Talking heads in the media and their public have learned to be like children: they want to be told bed time stories, so that their tired little minds can go to sleep.

They cannot handle culture and logic, they are not trained for it. All what appeals to them is what would appeal to little children talking to each other, little anecdotes with a strong imaginary component.

As the Roman republic went down, culture and art went down, and they went down well ahead of the military and economic capabilities. Rome became idiotic first, and then , several decades later, it became completely incapacitated in all ways. Only then did the Huns moved in, from distant Mongolia.

Why did Rome become idiotic? Because the Roman republic had been kidnapped by the hyper rich "Senatorial" class. The hyper rich quickly learned that they ruled best over dummies, and bleating sheep. During the transition to generalized idiocy, those who refused to cooperate were killed. The philosopher and Consul Cicero, saw the hands he was writing with chopped off, and nailed to the Senate door. And that is not an imaginary anecdote a la Reagan. This atrocity was meant to impress those too willing to keep on writing down smart, progressive thoughts.

Finally the plutocracy mixed up with the theocrats, and any knowledge or thinking was denounced as an insult to "God". This episode is now called the Dark Ages. But it started with the rise of the stupid, paid by the hyper rich to extinguish c ulture and intelligence.

This is exactly what is going in the media today. The venality and stupidity of the "debate" on health care is deliberate, it is made to encourage stupidity, it teaches stupidity, it celebrates stupidity.

In truth, if anything should escape the profit motive, it is compassion. The obsession with profits and costs (not just the profits and costs of a financial, but also those of a legal, business, or marketing character) perverts the entire health care system in the USA. And not just for medical decisions.

For example, a peer reviewed article in Science Magazine explains that fewer and fewer drugs are brought to market (down to less than 30 from a peak triple this twenty years ago), because pharmaceutical companies are playing Wall Street. In truth MILLIONS of drugs could be brought to market, from natural products alone, says Science.

And so on. The health care insurance industry exists in a country such as France (with the best health care according to the WHO), but it does not insure the life threatening conditions' basic treatments. That is automatic (even for sick or hurt Americans who would happen to pass through France). Private health care in France insures only added comfort or plastic surgery type treatments. The moral position that an industry can thrive according to the modus operandi:"Your money, or your life!" is untenable in this civilization, and has been rejected in all advanced countries, except the USA.

At this point the extravagant portion of GDP given to those who profit financially from the bad health of others has become a strategic threat to the USA.

Wisely, Obama is gambling that he can defeat the stupidity head on, by rising the mental level of the debate. If he fails, the USA will keep on collapsing mentally, and the rest will follow. After all, the financial crisis, and the way it was solved (replenishing with20public money, the private perpetrators themselves, without any strings attached) is the sort of idiocy that history shows change the fate of civilizations, and not for the best.
***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

WHAT AILS THE ARABS? [A foretaste.]

2009-07-24T09:44:00.000-07:00

ZIONIST ENTITY VERSUS ISLAMIST ENTITY? OR JUST THE LATER?

"The Economist" disserts on Arabia (July 23, 2009). Another occasion for me to attack the subject with the sharp knife of unbowed philosophy, while proffering my usual incantations (please respect me as I practice my religion of universal critique). (A more detailed essay extending this will appear, hopefully, on wordpress, where many articles on the subject already exist, following those on patriceayme.com.)
***

"The Economist" comes back on the mysterious philosophico-political disease that afflicts Arab speaking nations, and turns around the problem like the wolf turns around the moose, not daring to bite, or even to come too close... No apparent desire to experience high explosives, or sharp blades, how to blame them?

An instant optimistic, "The Economist" opines in its lead editorial that:"A quiet revolution has begun in the Arab world; it will be complete only when the last failed dictatorship is voted out." Still "The Economist" wonders: "What ails the Arabs?", but it does not dare, or is unable to give one of these sharp answers it likes.

All it dares to do, is to hint at the nature of the disease:

..."more people, especially women, are becoming educated, and businessmen want a bigger say in economies dominated by the state. Above all, a revolution in satellite television has broken the spell of the state-run media and created a public that wants the rulers to explain and justify themselves as never before. On their own, none of these changes seems big enough to prompt a revolution. But taken together they are creating a great agitation under the surface. The old pattern of Arab government—corrupt, opaque and authoritarian—has failed on every level and does not deserve to survive."

In other words, according to "The Economist" what ails the Arabs is a cultural phenomenon.

Reading more carefully, one see that it has to do with Islam:

"Some in the West are wary of Arab elections, fearing that Islamists would exploit the chance to seize power on the principle of “one man, one vote, one time”. Yet Islamists seem to struggle to raise their support much above 20% of the electorate. Non-Arab Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia suggest that democracy is the best way to draw the poison of extremism. Repression only makes it more dangerous."

"The Economist" forgets to mention that such was the theory of the Islamists in Algeria, twenty years ago. After they won the first round of elections, the Algerian army had to seize power, and reset the (would-be) democratic system to zero. Otherwise Algeria would be now like Iran (or probably much worse, because there is so much Western European culture in Algeria, that there would have been an even more horrific civil war than what happened, with just a few hundred thousands killed).

"The Economist" forgets to mention also that in most countries where Islam cohabits with democracy nowadays, a very violent past cracked down on Islam, way back.
***

WE PRAY QUIETLY, THUS THEY CAN PREY MIGHTILY:

OK, enough with the wooden tongue, the one that is in the mouth, but does not quite work, due to rigidity and inappropriateness to the supple nature of thought.

Some Arabs would say it's the Zionist Entity, or colonialism, that afflicts Arabia, or... But rarely is the Islamist Entity evoked.

Islam is to blame for the friendliness of Arab countries to dictatorship. A command in Islam (a verse in the Qur'an) orders believers to follow their leaders without any question, as long as they are Muslim. To do otherwise is to disobey God.

Thus the problem is very simple, and not really different from the catastrophic fanaticism that caused the Dark Ages in the Roman empire.

Islam is actually a direct prolongation of it: Muhammad faithfully copied what he had below his nose, and that inspired him so much, the demented caesaropapism a la Justinian, which had immensely damaged the Roman empire and civilization itself, from a particular interpretation of Roman Catholicism, which was imposed by killing millions and oppressing even more (leading to a terrible war with Sassanid Persia).

What of countries which have Muslim majorities, and are not dictatorship? Well, they adopted enough of the Western European model in their political culture to fight off Islam. This is true for Turkey, or Indonesia, etc... In Iran, the father of the late Shah, founder of his dynasty, took even more terrible measures against Islam than Ataturk did. Simply something is left of that history today.

Here is the verse in the Qur'an:

“O YE WHO BELIEVE! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and OBEY THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE IN POWER.” (Qur’an’s , Sura 4; verse 59).

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com

For more details please see:

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/

And also:

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/

PLUTOCRACY REIGNS BEST OVER IDIOCY

2009-07-23T11:20:00.000-07:00

ENFORCED STUPIDITY AS A TOOL OF DELIBERATE OPPRESSION.

Talking heads in the media complained that Obama did not tell just little anecdotes during his description of the problem of the health care system. Krugman opines that: "what are the talking heads really complaining about? It’s not what Obama didn’t do — it’s what he did, namely talk seriously about policy. How unpresidential of him!"

But there is a deeper problem. And that is that enforced stupidity has become an instrument of deliberate oppression.

Talking heads in the media and their public are like children: they want to be told bed time stories, so that their tired little minds can go to sleep.

They cannot handle culture and logic, they are not trained for it. All what appeals to them is what would appeal little children talking to each other, little anecdotes with a strong imaginary component.

As the Roman republic went down, culture and art went down, and they went down ahead of the military and economic capabilities. Rome became idiotic first, and then was progressively completely incapacitated.

Why did Rome become idiotic? Because the Roman republic had been kidnapped by the hyper rich "Senatorial" class. The hyper rich tolerated only dummies. During the transition to generalized idiocy, those who refused to cooperate were killed. The philosopher and Consul Cicero, saw the hands he was writing with chopped off, and nailed to the Senate door. And that is not an imaginary anecdote a la Reagan. It was meant to impress those too willing to keep on writing down smart, progressive thoughts.

Finally the plutocracy mixed up with the theocrats, and any knowledge or thinking was denounced as an insult to "God". This episode is called the Dark Ages. But it started with the rise of the stupid, paid to reign by the hyper rich.

This is exactly what is going in the media today. The venality and stupidity of the "debate" on health care is deliberate, it is made to encourage stupidity, it teaches stupidity. Wisely, Obama is gambling that he can defeat the stupidity head on, by rising the mental level. If he fails, the USA will keep on collapsing mentally, and the rest will follow. After all, the financial crisis, and the way it was solved (replenishing the perpetrators) is the sort of idiocy that history shows change the fate of civilization, and not for the best.
***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
***
(published in Krugman's blog comments, #10)
***

Here is the full Krugman blog post.
July 23, 2009.

"What’s in a name?
OK, so let me get this straight. The initial reaction of the cable talking heads was that Obama blew it because he didn’t couch his argument in terms of personal anecdotes, Reagan-style. Then, when it was pointed out that he did, in fact, offer a number of specific examples of people harmed by our current system, the whine became that he didn’t give their names.

Now, it’s true that George Bush liked to give names of people who would benefit from his tax cuts; but Ronald Reagan’s anecdotes — about, say, the Cadillac-driving welfare queen — generally didn’t name names. And there was a good reason for that: with rare exceptions, Reagan’s folksy anecdotes weren’t true.

So what are the talking heads really complaining about? It’s not what Obama didn’t do — it’s what he did, namely talk seriously about policy. How unpresidential of him!"

THINKER IN CHIEF?

2009-07-22T21:18:00.000-07:00

In his blog, Krugman reveals that Obama is the "Professor in chief": "I found Obama’s health care presentation so impressive — so much command of the issues — that it had me worried. If I really like a politicians’ speech, isn’t that an indication that he lacks the popular touch? (A couple of points off for “incentivize” — what ever happened to “encourage”? — but never mind.)

Seriously, it’s really good to see how much he gets it."

Yes, well, I particularly loved the sneak attacks against "the profit motive" delivered with great care and subtility, so as not to hurt and revolt, but just so as to leave a deep mark on the subconscious of the bleating media sheep (which seemed aware of their own mental short comings as they struggled to rise to the occasion, something I have observed with sheep in the wild, when they try to understand what to do). And, of course, that presentation was made to change the subconscious of the nation, as the dose of higher philosophy ("health care is not about profit, and actually the profit motive is toxic to health") was delivered twice with an extremely light touch, as if Obama himself was baffled by the idea, and was just trying to formulate modestly gathering thoughts...

Indeed, it's high time that "We The People" understands that stupidity is the road to hell in a waste basket. The popular obsession of mental retardation shrouded in sport scores, is not just ludicrous, it's an indecent threat to planetary survival.

In the present situation, the revolutionary reflex: "Off With Their Heads!, cannot even be evoked. Verily, before the people's heads could be cut off, they would need some. We may as have been dealing with sponges placidly bathing in plutocratic juice, but now Obama is showing them what a brain can do.

Obama's role is to be father of the nation, and he does that very well, because a father is someone who knows, and feels, more. It's easy to know more than children who have travelled nowhere. Obama has lived overseas, and not just overseas in an equivalent place such as Western Europe, but overseas in a (at the time) severely underdeveloped country of the Muslim type (my case exactly, by the way, but longer and deeper, making me fiercer).

So Obama is mentally deep (except in the waters where Larry Summers swim like a self assured globular sardine, while Obama is not hungry yet). It is good that the American People is exposed to some mental activity of the higher type, that's what the USA needs. The best profits are of the mental type. Learn.

By the way, there is a tradition in a country such as France, of presidents who actually know their stuff, and have the "vision thing" as Bush the First used to say, in one of his most notable efforts to form a sentence.

It is a particular grotesque behavior that American presidents have been overly dependent on "speech writers" to think. Obama is the Thinker In Chief, and powers to that! It is not just human, what man is all about, but it is also honest: instead of a plutocratic machine producing a figurehead actor, we get a human being thinking higher thougths.

So do not tremble, oh little Krugman, sheeps cannot devour minds.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

FREE MARKETS FANATICS CRASH AND BURN.

2009-07-22T06:34:00.000-07:00

AMERICAN ECONOMISTS AS UNIVERSAL MECHANICS:

Doctor Paul Krugman suddenly shows his true colors, from back when he was an adviser of Ronald Reagan, before he played progressive in the media, for his greater glory.

He writes in his blog, July 21, 2009: “The solution to climate change must rely... on market mechanisms — it’s too complex an issue to deal with using command-and-control. ”

Really? Another complex issue is air traffic control, which, thus, according to the good Dr. Krugman, "must rely on market mechanisms". Goldman Sachs could sell the right to land first to who will pay more in the instant. Then if someone pays even more, they could sell the right to land first to that one instead. And so on. Then they could sell bets on who will crash first.

No doubt, pretty soon, air travel would experience a final solution to the problem of its existence. Most planes having crashed, there would be no more carbon emission that way. The air travel industry would follow the American society into the ground. Or even below, where Pluto is located.
***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

P/S 1: Of course high fossil fuel taxes is the way to conserve and force efficiencies. A carbon tax is the way to fix, worldwide the worst proble of globalization, which is that it gave ways for plutocracy to turn around legislation.

[P/S 2: The central argument above is too critical of the market concept as panacea, so the New York Times refused to publish it, pursuing a pattern of avoiding to publish my deepest critiques against the present economic system (they systematically refused to publish my observations about the private fractional reserve banking system, for example)...]

RUB IT IN: RUBIN FOREVER.

2009-07-19T10:19:00.000-07:00

PLUS DE CHANGE, PLUS DE PLUTOCRACIE:
***

In his blog post, "Morning Joe" (July 19, 2009), Paul Krugman deplores the absence in the Obama administration of a great economist such as Stiglitz (and, implicitly, and naturally, himself). Paul makes a few observations:

"...the larger story is the absence of a progressive-economist wing. A lot of people supported Obama over Clinton in the primaries because they thought Clinton would bring back the Rubin team; and what Obama has done is … bring back the Rubin team. Even the advisory council, which is supposed to bring in skeptical views, does so by bringing in, um, Marty Feldstein..."

[Martin Feldstein is an extreme conservative (by European standards) economist, a partisan advising G. W. Bush to privatize social security, and a fanatical enemy of Europe, who views Europe as a natural enemy of the USA, and who naturally opposed the European currency in all ways.]

OK, let Paul finish his discourse:

"The point is that even if you think the leftish wing of economics doesn’t have all the answers, you’d expect some people from that wing to be at the table...

Joe Stiglitz stands out because in addition to being on the progressive wing, he’s also, as I said, a giant among academic economists. But I think the real story is more about excluded points of view than excluded people."
***
So I sent the following comment supporting Paul's views:

Indeed, many people supported Obama because they were sure that Clinton would bring back the Rubin team of plutocratic critters.

So Obama brought back the Rubin team, demonstrating that the plutocratic octopus is everywhere, and that there is something deep about Nader's insistence that the game is rigged.

Nader did not invent that line: it's the old saw that Communists and Socialists were using already a century ago.

After the Communists and Socialist made headway with that observation, the plutocrats produced the fascists who carefully imitated Communist and Socialist headlines with their own propaganda (Mussolini and Hitler said that they carefully did so).

So now, here we are. Just standing in place is called being part of the "progressive wing". Because what we are facing is a regressive movement. People who insist that destroying the earth is no worries of theirs, people who insist that worth is defined by financial profits, and that only a small oligarchy can have access to these financial profits, and that the entire population should pay to make it so, are not conserving any of the character of the republic.

In truth, they are regressives, who want to go back to the Middle Ages, and have already partly succeeded to do so. Why? Because they are turning into the new Lords. Politicians are motivated to help them achieve this status, because they are themselves rewarded the old fashion way, by being elevated to considerably greater riches as Clinton was (the average Congressman and Senator are already multi millionaire while they "serve" their mandates, namely themselves).
***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
***

P/S: A president, though, contacted Stiglitz, and gave him a mission: try to define a better definition of GDP.

This has been one my war horses: to redefine GDP completely (and I have an elaborated solution, involving USING ENERGY AS CURRENCY, which allows to discard the inefficient part of GDP, and introduce in GDP what is very worthy, but not in the present GDP).

That president is located in Paris, he is the president of France, and his name is Sarkozy. It is instructive to realize that Merkel, Sarkozy, and even Brown, are way left of Obama, and are using American intellectual resources to progress. But, once one has realized that economically Obama is the Rubin team, that is not very surprising.

One thing that would surprise Americans, though, is the spite and anger, even among leaders, that the impudence of American plutocracy is causing overseas.
***

WHEREOF ONE CANNOT THINK, THEREOF ONE MUST NOT KILL.

2009-07-17T22:42:00.000-07:00

Tyranosopher wrote:
July 18, 2009 5:39

What is the aim of the war in Afghanistan? For the Afghans, it is to get rid of the invaders. For Mr. Obama, it is to get rid of Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda is not in Afghanistan anymore. So why is Mr. Obama truly sending more combat troops in Afghanistan and making more war? So that more people, and soldiers, will get killed?

It is more important to know why one is fighting a war than to fight it. Why one is fighting is the most important ingredient for victory, when the issue of a war is uncertain. When one bombs people's home, to kill them, one better make sure one's reasons are good. But the West is bombing people's homes, in Afghanistan, and its reasons are no good.

Neither the Taliban, nor Al Qaeda were created by Afghanistan, or by Afghans: both were created by the CIA, or by proxies of the CIA such as the ISI from Pakistan.

Mr. Obama heard that the Afghan government has confirmed a misogynistic law confirming that women, by law, can be raped by their husbands, but, by law, they have to enjoy it. He became indignant, asked for reconsideration. Why? Does Mr. Obama celebrate Islam? Has not he declared in Cairo he would be the defender of that faith? The Qur'an explicitly take the position confirmed by the Afghan legislature allowing men to rape women ("women are your fields, so men go into your fields however you want, etc..."). When he heard of this, Mr. Obama decided to fall silent, deciding suddenly to follow Wittgenstein's advice: " "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent".

The constitution of the Islamist Republic of Afghanistan is Islam (and thus the Qur'an). So far, so good. So what is NATO doing in Afghanistan? Defending the Afghan Islamist constitution. Against whom? Islamists. Mr. Obama made clear he loved Islamists, just not those. Those he wants to kill. Why? Because they kill people. Why does Mr. Obama go to Afghanistan to kill Islamists? Because that's where they live.

In other words, Western leadership has obviously gone crazy. The philosophical aim of the war has become to defend a peculiar view of Islam against a certain group of Islamists (thus it aims at establishing a particular religion, a characterized violation of the constitution of the USA).

To understand the Afghanistan war, at this point, G. Orwell' "!984" seems more important than American discourses. Time to go home.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

(Published in "The Economist")

GOLD MAN SACKS

2009-07-17T06:30:00.000-07:00

REFINED CENSORSHIP:
The comment below (after ***XXX***) was sent swiftly to the New York Times, after Krugman's editorial. My comment agreed with the editorial, but it went much further; for some reason, the NYT thought it was better not to publish it; now the strongest statement in my comment, was, by far, the attack against the Fractional Reserve Banking System; thus the conclusion I reach that it is viewed as a dangerous assault against the core of the system. Which it is. This shows the power and subtility of media control. This is not the first time this happens.)
***

THE PLUTO IN PLUTOCRACY:
In Russia one more courageous woman lawyer fighting for human rights was arrested by uniformed security forces, in full day light, and promptly shot to death. This is what happens when an oligarchy is even more out of control than the one in the USA today.

The criminal behavior of some fascist oligarchs in Russia is reminiscent,in its reckless disregard for a semblance of civilization, to the reckless behavior of some financiers in the USA. Or conversely.

Paul Krugman has joined the chorus against Goldman Sachs, a typical, ongoing financial conspiracy in the USA (before 2009, that conspiracy was called an "investment bank", now it's simply a "bank").

Says Krugman in his NYT editorial (July 17, 2009): "Goldman Sachs’s record quarterly profits show us that the investment bank is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America."

Here is my comment below (a more incisive version, "Gold Man Sucks", with sharper philosophy, will hopefully be posted on patriceayme.wordpress):
***XXX***

COMMENT ON GOLDMAN SACHS AND BANKING SPURNED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Goldman Sachs would not exist if not for the taxpayer. The taxpayer saved Goldman Sachs from extinction in 2008. To reward the taxpayer, Goldman Sachs is fully reestablishing its dominion.

Goldman Sachs got a 13 billion dollars gift through AIG, from the taxpayer, and probably much more, secretly, at some point through the secret operations of the Federal Reserve (unaudited by the US Congress). Just these $13 billion is about 25% of the stimulus distributed, so far, for more than 300 million Americans. But Goldman Sachs got it in 2008. Goldman gets first class service, and most of the service that exists. The USA seems to exist to serve Goldman.

China's economy is growing again close to 8% per year. Why? Because of a giant stimulus to its economy. In the USA, there has been an even much larger stimulus. But not a stimulus for the economy; that one is small: officially $787 billion but in truth a small fraction of this (once the AMT and the subventions to the crashing states have been removed).

No, the giant stimulus in the USA has been for the bankers, the same group of private individuals, some particular bankers, that caused the disaster to start with. All of Goldman Sachs is part of it. Banks should have been saved as institutions, no doubt. But should well organized criminals be saved too? Yes, it sounds like an unrelated question. So why did the government of the USA relate both propositions? Because there are always Goldman Sachs officers in the government of the USA? Does this have to do with Goldman Sachs' acumen in profiting from the disasters it itself advise periodically to engage in?

China has banks too. But the Chinese government gave guidelines about who and what should get money for its real stimulus to the economy, and that meant the real economy, not speculation.

How come China could achieve this, and not the USA? Because China is a People's republic. The Chinese government controls its bankers. In the USA, the bankers control the government.

Make no mistake: China is also a plutocracy. Children of Communist party officials control the economy to a great extent. official statistics show this. Simply, the USA is even more of a plutocracy, and thus, in that particular dimension, less of a republic.

In the fractional reserve system, bankers, private individuals, fabricate the money. It is time to realize that this FRACTIONAL RESERVE SYSTEM IS A DEVOLUTION OF CIVILIZATION. The only way out is to reestablish a greater control of banking, enforcing on bankers an ontology, an oath of office, and severe controls, to finally make them officially into the officers of the state they already are. It is part of the solution for allowing its rightful owners, the People,to repossess the State.

Indeed, right now, a particular group of private bankers and their business associates, rule the USA as their own private state, instead of letting the public do their own thing (which is what a republic is, supposedly).

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

INFINITE WISDOM ONLY FROM ETERNAL LIFE?

2009-07-15T23:51:00.000-07:00

SINCE WISDOM EXTENSION WE NEED, LIFE EXTENSION WE WILL SEEK.

Extending life will extend wisdom. Not just because people will know more, including how childish many a passion is, but because they will have more to lose if policies go wrong.

So life extension will not be a luxury, but a necessity, because if a given threshold of wisdom is not reached, humanity will be exterminated.

BTW, there is a theory, by very serious people, that it is stress, not calorie restriction per se, which causes life extension in animals. So here! (Anti oxydant studies' perplexing results have led to this counter-intuitive view...)

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

MONEY SWINDLER GUIDANCE

2009-07-02T22:27:00.000-07:00

WHEN THE HOUSE GOES TO THE FOXES.

Obama passed a pseudo stimulus package of around 800 billion dollars. Some of it was fake, such as the AMT adjustment(a standard part of the Fed budget), some was running in place: such as money sent to states that are cutting their own spending. Best example: 50 billion dollars of the Federal stimulus is sent to California, at the time when California state budget went into a deep freeze (thousands of California state projects were stopped, all employees were told to stay home, and not be paid one Friday out of two; starting July first, it's three days with no work and no pay, almost two months worth of salary, and work, a year, now reduced to zero, and the pitiful Obama stimulus cannot stop that non sense).

Moreover, the Obama "stimulus" spent so far is about 50 billion dollars. China's stimulus was about 500 billions, but three quarters of it has been spent, and it's on real infrastructure.

By comparison, Goldman Sachs, through TARP money sent to AIG, got a gift of 13 billion dollars from the proverbial "taxpayers", the government of the USA, in the name of the American People. Question: what does Goldman Sachs make? What employment does it support? For example, Boeing makes planes. Goldman Sachs makes transactions, as many as possible, and then extracts a cut for each. It does not make anything real, let alone anything that would help people. Goldman Sachs has been about greasing the wheels for so long, there are not more wheels, only grease.

When FDR was president the Federal budget was a very small part of GDP (this changed only with World War Two) . So FDR could do little, but to legislate very creatively and very boldly and intelligently, and all of that he did.

Obama, by contrast, controls a huge part of the GDP, but he gave most of this control to the dim witted foxes he put in charge of watching the hen house (see above: 50 billion stimulus, so far, 13 billion for Goldman Sachs alone, if not more through the central bank secret operations). Obama can do a lot, but, as long as he puts the profiteers in charge of not changing the system, all he can show is the profiteers profiteering again, as he boasts of regularly on TV, as if he accomplished something important. Well, maybe important to him.

Just two examples from France: the government there has decided to create a gigantic fast automatic 24/7 train in an immense eight connecting all four of Paris airports and business districts and central hubs. Cost: 50 billion dollars. Work on four new high speed train lines is proceeding. The high speed train line through the "metropolises" of the French Riviera (Marseilles-Toulon-Cannes-Nice) was decided this week. It will be underground a lot, so it's immensely expensive: 30 billion dollars. Next generation nuclear reactors are also being built. And so on. That is what one calls really stimulating.

Eco-nomy means house-management. It does not mean profiteering from the house. As long as Obama puts financiers (Summers, Geithner, and various other mental gnomes from Goldman Sachs) in charge of managing the house, they will keep on stealing it. That's all they know. For a fox, the essence of intelligence is killing chicken.

House-management is fundamentally not about money. Money helps to motivate the children, and keep tabs on their activities, but rather it's just a way to help, not the essence of the thing. The essence is productive work. It's for the People and its democratically elected government, guided by the deepest thinkers to decide what productive work is, it is not the business of the money swindlers.

Such is Obama's mistake, and it could all end very badly, if he does not correct this in time.

I know someone with a PhD who works as an quality control inspector overseeing the Food and Drug Administration. She informed me an hour ago that all her portion of the overseeing system she works for will be cancelled in September. Meanwhile Mr. Obama is stimulating the Afghans by killing and terrorizing a lot of them. Change you can sneer by.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

WILL TO NOODLE?

2009-06-25T23:16:00.001-07:00

NOT ENOUGH AUDACITY TO ACT FOR THE PEOPLE?

Paul Krugman, in his June 25 New York times editorial "Not Enough Audacity", points out that: "When it comes to domestic policy, there are two Barack Obamas.. On one side there’s Barack the Policy Wonk, whose command of the issues — and ability to explain those issues in plain English — is a joy to behold. But on the other side there’s Barack the Post-Partisan, who searches for common ground where none exists, and whose negotiations with himself lead to policies that are far too weak.

Both Baracks were on display in the president’s press conference earlier this week. First, Mr. Obama offered a crystal-clear explanation of the case for health care reform, and especially of the case for a public option competing with private insurers. “If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care, if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal,” he asked, “then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.”But when asked whether the public option was non-negotiable he waffled, declaring that there are no “lines in the sand.”... So Mr. Obama and Democrats in Congress have to hang tough — no more gratuitous giveaways in the attempt to sound reasonable. And reform advocates have to keep up the pressure to stay on track."

I have defended for years the idea to use a public health plan to out-compete the private health plans. Because of its bulk, a public health plan can negotiate lower prices from drug makers, and it is cheaper, because it does not have to make such a profit that it would attract investors. Now, clearly, the people who expect to make a fortune from the bad health of their fellow citizens, are terrified by the perspective of losing a major source of gouging. So the plutocrats are on the rope, and now is not the time to rescue them, They were already rescued by giving them a few trillions for their bankrupted banks.

But there is a more general question.

The leader of May 68, the highly successful Franco-German politician, Daniel Cohn-Bendit,has boosted ecology in France and the European parliament. Considering his great popularity, he has been pressed to run for the French presidency, but the "green giant" declined "Because to be president, one has to be a killer."

By this Daniel Cohn-Bendit meant that the French president comes across decisions where he has to decide to kill people. It is part of the job. France declared war to Hitler on September 3, 1939. During the cold war, Soviet attack plans in Europe intended to stop at the French border, because the Soviets were persuaded that France would strike with its nuclear arsenal. Same for Britain. Everybody knew that the defense of democracy, worldwide, depended upon the military resolve of the three great democracies, Britain, France, and the USA. That, in turn, depends upon them being led by killers.

To be a strong warrior, one has to have resolve. One has to believe in something beyond seduction. Of course, successful politicians, in a democracy, have to be seducers, otherwise they would not be elected. But the heads of government of the top democracies have to be more. They have such very strong beliefs that they would order whatever is necessary.

Obama believes deeply, apparently, that the truth is somewhere between yesterday's obsolete democrats, and yesterday's obsolete republicans. But, being half way lost between two wrongs does not make one right. That the USA does not have a public health plan is abysmal, and it has become a national weakness so great, it is actually a strategic threat against the USA.

Obama has enormous power and clout at his disposal right now, but he is wasting them because he seems to believe that it is wise to believe in nothing except being the interlocutor between adorers of the plutocrats on the left, and adorers of the plutocrats on the right.

Look at the gas tax: it has never been lower, because it is not adjusted for inflation. But Obama will not rise his voice about such things, he just runs a deficit that will soon paralyze him. All he seems to want is play a smile on TV. But the USA, and democracy, need, even require, to be defended by people with ultimate convictions. If one is so weak in one's conviction, that one cannot dispose of the weakest ideas of the extreme right, that have proven so completely wrong, for so long, how could one look as if one could order a nuclear strike? Because it is ultimately what it is at.

Obama's metapsychological waffling is also apparent in foreign policy. After proclaiming the Qur'an "holy" several times in Cairo, he declared: “And I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” Apparently Obama had forgotten the blatantly secular Constitution of the USA. The consequences were immediate: Khamenei, the official "Supreme Guide" of Islam in Iran, stole the election there, within days. Khamenei had every reason to expect that Obama would fight by his side, against the "negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear", for example in the streets of Teheran.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Note: For days, Obama held to the position that "The difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised." Maybe the noodle is al dente, maybe it is not...

EARTHQUAKE ECONOMY NOT

2009-06-25T08:52:00.000-07:00

A CASE WHERE VALUES OF THE ECONOMY OF THE USA ARE REVEALED:

Simon Johnson observes in his blog, "The Baseline Scenario": "You cannot design a financial system that is immune to crash – this would be like declaring earthquakes illegal. But in the aftermath of unexpectedly high damage from a serious earthquake, it makes sense to completely overhaul your building code and retrofit vulnerable buildings. In fact, if you largely ignored what the earthquake revealed in terms of structural weakness, wouldn't that be negligence?" (June 25, 2009).

Well, pondering the philosophy of earthquakes, so to speak, has been one of my preferred themes. It is very revealing of the true values of the socioeconomy of the USA, and how one got there.

Speaking of earthquakes, indeed, California is grossly unprepared (building codes are grossly inappropriate). Several big ones are expected anytime, and, if they struck in metro areas (one earthquake of more than 7 Richter is due in the central San Francisco Bay Area), they could kill many thousands (maybe up to 50,000).

And what is being done? Well, the city of San Francisco has admitted that many thousands homes should collapse (due to their pathetically weak garages in front and below). And one is just waiting. Although the irony is that doing something about impending vast death and immense destruction would help the economy right away (there is a 11.5% unemployment rate in California, May 2009). This is a case where a state, and, or, federal mandate for more strongly built homes, would enforce frantic construction, spurring the economy, and saving thousands tomorrow.

So why is nothing being done? Probably because construction by the people for the people does not particularly fascinate the plutocracy. What's in it for the oligarchy? Nothing much (they live somewhere else in better homes). Actually spending money on housing for normal people would be as much money not going to banks, their bankers, and their shadows.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

FROM PLUTOCRACY TO PLUTOCRAZY.

2009-06-24T15:07:00.000-07:00

HOW PLUTOCRACY TAKES CARE:

Krugman asked why it was that so many representatives in the USA were against the health strategy suggested by Obama, which incorporates a public health plan. I answered this:

The present day, private health care of the USA privatizes profits and socializes costs (because those who do not have insurance go to the emergency room). it is exactly the same strategy that the plutocracy follows as it does with the banks. Senators in love with the present health care are in love with the plutocracy. They love the hand that feed them. The worth of the average Senator is nearly five million dollars. Plutocracy is turning into plutocrazy. Alleluia!

On the serious side, a public health care system can only cost less to the nation than any private plan, because the later is laden with the profit motive. So any federal health care plan will out-compete any private plan.

Then the public plan will inexorably devour all the private health care plans, one after the other, state after state. That would be a tragedy for the plutocracy, really. Then the plutocracy would have increasingly to depend on gouging the public with banks and their shadows. That would be unbalanced, and would reduce the profits of politicians by reducing their sources of income, influence, and power.

Six hours later, June 22, 2009, 9:09 am on his blog, Krugman wrote this: "Competition, redefined: ... Sen. Blanche Lincoln [whines] about how terrible it would be if a government-run insurance plan undermined free-market competition, then Krugman and others observes that:

The Justice Department considers an industry to be “highly concentrated” if one company has 42 percent of the market. In Arkansas — Senator Lincoln should take note — Blue Cross Blue Shield has 75 percent of the market. If you take government self-insurance plans out of the equation, it’s higher. The state ranks as the ninth most concentrated in the country. Is it any wonder that insurance premiums have risen five times as fast as wages?

The truth is that the notion of beneficial competition in the insurance industry is all wrong in the first place: insurers mainly compete by engaging in “risk selection” — that is, the most successful companies are those that do the best job of denying coverage to those who need it most. But in any case, Arkansas is in effect a one-insurer monopoly state, with no competition at all — unless a public plan is created.
In fact, I may have a new hypothesis about the political economy of the health care fight. One thing that’s obvious, if you look at the balking Democrats I chided in the NYT 22 June column is that almost all of them come from states with small population. These are also, by and large, states in which one or at most two private insurers dominate the market.
So here’s a suggestion: while the opponents of a private plan say that they’re trying to defend market competition, what they’re actually doing is defending lucrative local monopolies.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

ONLY GOVERNMENT INVEST IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE

2009-06-21T12:37:00.000-07:00

NO INVESTING DEMOCRACY, NO DEMOCRACY.

In the economic system as it is in the USA, bankers, by deciding who gets the money, create the economy. And the question is, once they are done, does this economy do anything the People want, or even anything the People need? The latest crisis, and the state of the present economy of the USA show that the answer to both is a resounding no. One has just to look at: decaying health care, deindustrialization, and a median income stagnant or going down for decades, and an economy that is losing its comparative advantages in so many ways that it is incapable of maintaining its independence.

Hence the economy is too important to be left to bankers. Somehow the place of the state (hopefully elected by the People, not bankers) has to grow. So the question becomes: how do you control plutocracy, once it has got out of control? It is not easy. Once the influence of private interests on government has grown enough, very little stop them.

An extraneous example: eleven French engineers were killed by a bomb in Pakistan. It was assumed that it was Al Qaeda. But yesterday two French antiterrorist judges informed the families that it was actually agents of the Pakistani government, who were unsatisfied by how much money they got under the table, that did the deed.

The point: after some degree of expectation is reached, the powerful will not be held by anything, to keep getting the power they view as their due. Back to the USA: ten days ago or so, a Congressman said in the New York Times about bankers and Congress: "They run the place".

When moral expectations are too low for the main economic actors, one gets an economy that has no morality.

To fix that, moral standards have to rise again. A place to start is by limiting compensation. In Europe, main street is asking for it, just as in Iran main street is asking for the right to change the government. But what is main street asking for in the USA? Did it get bad enough yet? In Iran, or Europe, people know that a government not representing them can make things turn immensely bad in daily life.

But the population of the USA does not have such collective painful memory. So the Obama administration is in a difficult position, trying to impose on bankers something the People did not ask for.

Plus, a major problem is that international corporations are able to declare profits in low tax jurisdictions (part of the tax heaven problem). A triage of what needs to be addressed first is of the essence. By inventing new methods for limiting the powers of rich individuals overseas first (fixing the tax heavens abroad), it may be just a question of translating them back in the USA (fixing the compensation heavens at home).

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

GOING GETS TOUGH, SO DIRIGISME STEPS IN.

2009-06-16T12:22:00.000-07:00

THE FREE MARKET IS AMATEURISH, THE GOVERNMENT IS SERIOUS.

(Posted On NYT's Krugman blog June 13, 2009)

As consummer spending has collapsed, the government of the USA (and of many other countries), has stepped in.

It is equivalent from switching from the Anglo-Saxon laissez faire to traditional French dirigisme (notice both words, laissez faire and dirigisme are French, because the debate started in France, and anticipated Adam Smith, who went there to study). Anyway, everything right with this picture.

In a country such as France, the citizens are chronic savers, obsessed by the wool stocking (bas de laine) in which they store for the future like squirrels and various corvids. So, chronically, people borrow little.

So who make the economy turn, and strive to the future? Well, the French government tax, spends and borrows. Now, who is the government? Well, France is a genuine democracy, so the government represents the People. (In recent elections, a few days ago, Sarkozy won, but all the vote of the left and ecologists gathered a bit more).

All of this to say that there is nothing wrong with going the French way to enliven an economy rather than the Anglo-Saxon way. Where it crucially matters, for defense, the USA actually follows French methods rather than the whim of the invisible hand.

What is the difference with the so called American model? Well, in the USA, the head of JP Morgan is supposed to finance what he considers worthy, projects presented to him by individuals. In practice this is all at the whim of a few unsupervised individuals that can do whatever. Jamie Dimon may be no demon, but his predecessors in the 1920s financed IG Farben (of Zyklon B fame) and Hitler.

It may be better to do the heavy financing, one ought even to say it is clearly better, in a democracy, to have the democracy do the heaviest financing, rather than little plutocrats in the shadows, doing invisible stuff with evry body’s money.

And indeed, where it crucially matters, in defense procurement, the USA follows the French model rather than the whim of the invisible hand.

So the stimulus has to be made bigger, a VAT and a carbon tax have to be introduced in the USA (to reduce the deficit from the larger stimulus; instead of viewing taxes as taxing, view them as enforced economic activity under democratic supervision).

But, first of all, government spending has to be freed from private wealthy interests: the stimulus has to go where it will multiply maximally. France does this to some extent with a big bureaucracy (bureaucracy being tellingly a French word). But that could no doubt be reduced (as Sarkozy wants to).

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

IS THE ECONOMY OF THE USA STALLING? (Wonkish)

2009-06-15T11:03:00.000-07:00

LOW AND HIGH STALL SPEEDS AS A BETTER MODEL:

A Minsky moment is the point in a credit cycle or business cycle when investors have cash flow problems due to spiraling debt they have incurred in order to finance speculative investments, encouraged by a long period of prosperity and increasing values of investments using borrowed money . At this point, a major selloff begins due to the fact that no counterparty can be found to bid at the high prices previously quoted, leading to a sudden and precipitous collapse in asset prices and a sharp drop in market liquidity.

Paul Krugman is on a quest to develop a model (see the note below). But I propose a different model for what is going on now, encouraged by a possible cause for the fall off the sky of AF 447.

The longer going into leverage works, the safer it looks, and the more profitable it "proves" to be, and thus the more the overall Highly Leverage Investing augments (both because there are more HLI individuals, and more leverage used individually).

So, being profitable, this keeps on augmenting until the system is so leveraged that a small downward fluctuation will cause impossible losses, and the system breaks down.

There is something a bit similar in aviation, called the "coffin corner". This is what happens when planes fly at very high altitude (to save fuel). The higher the plane goes, the less dense the air is, so the less support the plane gets, hence the higher goes the low speed stalling speed.

Augmenting the speed ever more as one goes ever higher does not work, because parts of the wings may experience supersonic flow, hence shock, and detachment, causing a loss of support: this is the high speed stall.

Both speeds, the low speed stall, and the high speed stall, eventually meet, as a plane goes higher. In commercial operations, they can be uncomfortably close (typically 100 mph, but sometimes as little as 20 mph), putting planes at the mercy of a strong gust (more frequent these days at high altitude).

The lack of industrialization in the USA is causing the low speed stall to augment, and then, the increased leverage to extract profits nevertheless is creating the shocks. Soon the entire contraption may head straight down towards the ocean... Lest an industry be recovered in time...

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
***

From Krugman's blog, June 15, 2009:

"I’m on a continuing quest to develop a tractable model of Minsky moments. Why? you may ask. Why not go with verbal intuition? Well, I’m enough of a conventional economist to think that there’s no substitute for a model with dotted i’s and crossed t’s; it’s not THE TRUTH, but it really does help clarify your thinking.

So here’s where I am right now. There is a class of models — Shleifer and Vishny is my main inspiration, although other models, like Kiyotaki and Moore, are in the same spirit — in which you can get something like a Minsky moment. The story goes something like this (this isn’t quite how Shleifer-Vishny does it, but not too different):

There are three kinds of investors: ordinary investors who buy when the price is low and sell when it’s high; noise traders, who buy and sell randomly*; and highly leveraged informed investors (HLIs), who try to buy low and sell high with other peoples’ money. On average, the HLIs should earn a high rate of return.

However, Shleifer-Vishny assume that there are two periods before the goodness of investments is revealed to all — and in period 2 even good investments can look bad thanks to selling by those noise traders. And if the noise traders drive the price down sufficiently, HLIs can face margin calls, forcing them to liquidate and push prices even lower. This is more or less the Minsky moment.

But how do we make Minsky moments endogenous? Think about playing this game repeatedly, with the number of HLIs varying based on past performance. If there are very few HLIs, expected returns are high and the probability of a Minsky moment (and its severity if it happens) are low; this will tend to bring more HLIs into the picture, until the system is highly vulnerable. A bad draw on noise traders, and there’s an asset price plunge that hits the HLIs very hard. People decide that leverage is a bad thing, and for a while those who do go into leverage do very well. And the cycle begins again.

It’s crude. But I think it does get the nonlinearity Brad DeLong was looking for (though I’d better work up the actual algebra to make sure!).

*In his new book The Myth of the Rational Market Justin Fox traces the lineage of the noise-trade assumption to an unpublished paper by Larry Summers that began, THERE ARE IDIOTS."

NAZISM, AND DENIERS, ALIVE AND WELL.

2009-06-12T12:23:00.000-07:00

BE NICE TO BANKERS, OR ELSE..."WE ARE ALL DEAD"...
(An expanded version of this essay below will, hopefully, be on wordpress some day soon).
***

Henri Pirenne had a new version of history: Western Europe encountered severe economic difficulties because of the Muslim invasion and embargo, he opined. That was really the break with, and the break of, the Roman empire. Aspects of this thesis are increasingly supported by archeological evidence (which increasingly shows wealth, and even increasing wealth, until savage invasions of the 6C and 7C: these invasions are not the famous German invasions around 400 CE, but a full 200 to 300 years later).

Earlier Gibbon (born 1737) had his own version of the Dark Ages; mostly caused by Christianism, he said. In truth, emperor Julianus had anticipated that situation, and tried mightily to stop it. But, mysteriously, a lance pierced his lung, and he died (363 CE).

This does not contradict Pirenne's thesis. Curiously and a mark of the power of religion, both points of view are still controversial, although the evidence for both, in first approximation, is as big as evidence can be.

When the Arab Muslims attacked (630 CE to 750 CE), they pretty much used total war (the milder Persians killed the Umayyads, and took control in 750 CE).

The Muslim embargo cut off paper to Europe (from papyrus), so the Europeans had to learn to write on animal hides, and learning took a big blow (books became very difficult to make, and got recycled). That is just one example of the impact of the Muslim embargo. Spices, which were obtained by the trade routes through the Middle East is another (they were life saving, because they protected foods from spoilage). Suddenly more than half of the Roman empire was missing, and the world was at war, total war (a telling anecdote: the Roman emperor visited Rome to take the metallic roofs of the capital away, to melt them and make weapons, to fight the Arabs). Cut off from more than half of its own country, the GDP of Europe got devastated.

Christian enthusiasm (363 CE: first burning of a large library under emperor Jovian) led to the destruction of nearly all books of Greco-Roman Antiquity, including basic knowledge, and making the surviving roman intellectuals flee to Persia, and the treacherous denial of their rights by the Roman Catholics, even after an international accord with the Persians about the right of return of Romans intellectuals into the Roman empire, led to a massive war between Rome (verily Constantinople) and Persia. Hence Gibbon's vision of what caused the Dark Ages is just as obvious, in first approximation. The Jews barely survived, every body else got eliminated (except on the fringes of the Roman Catholic empire). Antijudaism is the echo of that holocaust, throughout history.

I got great hostility from a European web site, the European Tribune, for suggesting some of the preceding (it was viewed as "Islamophobia", and an attack against this treasure for mankind, Christianity). Today I got banned from that site because I asserted that plutocrats had supported Hitler (never mind that the Dawes plan and that a USA bank such as JP Morgan in the 1920s, and the anti Jew Ford, financed the cartel IG Farben, of Zyklon B fame, or that Hitler was notoriously financed by many top industrialists; for example the magnate Thyssen wrote the famous book: "I paid Hitler").

One editor there violently disagreed with me about the number of people the Nazis had killed, before 1933,by more than an order of magnitude. He quoted what were obviously Nazi influenced numbers, and called my work "crap". Apparently he is German, and a pretty good expert at misquoting (me, at the very least). But I did not tell him he was overly sympathetic to Nazi reasonings, for once, I did not reply, because he and other people were using obcenities and were evoking human waste at this point.

The insulters asked for references. When I took the pain to give some, including the historian and USA defense advisor Carrol Quigley, my comments were removed from the site, and then another editor, Mr. Guillet, advised me that:"please go away or stop posting your junk. You're polluting the site with hateful or incoherent crap and you kill all possibility of dialogue by your inability/refusal to listen. Behave, or you'll be banned. This is the one and only warning you'll get. In the long run, we're all dead." Thu Jun 11th, 2009 at 04:22:23 PM EST.

It turns out that the admonishing not so gentle man, Jerome Guillet, is a banker in Paris in charge of financing renewable energy ("You make them, I finance them" is his motto). He seems to have beenn irritated by some comments of mine on the dearth of financing in renewable energy in 2009 (which I deplore, by the way). Or may be it was my observation that bankers are still in charge of saving the world, but that is not their calling (the quote above was at the end of a version of a post on banking, "Lesson Not Learned", which is on wordpress)

I did not react. Hours later, I got an email informing me that I was banned from the European Tribune.

So this is, 2009, 64 years after the defeat of Nazism, and philosophers get banned for presenting bankers with evidence about who financed Nazism. On croit rever... (One feels one is surely dreaming...) I wonder what that means, some Americans would say ironically. Can one relate such hysterical attitudes to holocaust denial? Should one do so? Do not media have a fiduciary duty of honesty relative to truth?

I guess Europe is not as advanced as one ought to hope...

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

CARBON TAX TO FOLLOW HIV TAX?

2009-06-03T06:10:00.000-07:00

Hot, and self absorbed debate in Washington about the "Cap and Trade" scheme proposed by Obama, which duplicates a system set up a long time ago in the European Union (with a carbon market exchange localized in Paris). That later system worked in reverse for quite a few years (not an intended effect), as the crafty polluters claimed to be polluting even more than they were, so as to get more credits, that they then made money from, while polluting even more in all legality. (We can fully expect American polluters to be just as crafty, a point that no doubt escaped the Obama adminstration... since it is following European errors step by step, so far. Sometimes apparent naivety's inner voice is greed, of course.)
***
In a strange fit of blessed naivety, Paul Krugman in his blog (June 3, 2009) opines that:"The only chance we have of a global agreement [on carbon emissions] is if the United States moves first; it will quickly be followed by other advanced countries, and then we sit down and use a combination of carrots and the threat of big sticks to get developing countries into the fold."

It's amusing how Americans can get to preach to others what they have been begged to do for decades by those exact same others. But what to do when the ignorant child gives the lesson to his mom she has been trying to teach him since ever? Smile and listen seriously?
***

France uses less than one-third of CO2 emission per unit of GDP that the USA uses. It may be an Anglo-Saxon free market capitalism thing: Australia, or Canada pollute just as much as the USA. (OK, some will say these are big countries, the giant CO2 orgy comes from that; but that does not resist examination: most of the transportation in these countries would be made tremendously more efficient by using European technology, and, by the way, Europe is just as big...)

All the talk about a commitment from “China” and “India” is putting the cart before the horse. China and India are trying to catch up technologically, and need to sell their wares, so they have been forced to raise their efficiency, just to follow the European Union (China duplicates the car CO2 emission of the EU, for example).

A lot of China is just delocalized industry of the USA, anyway; the products are sold in the USA, and a carbon tax would whip them into shape overnight.

So it’s all in the court of the USA.

The Obama administration has so far followed the easy way out, printing money it does not have, using China to foster its strange masochistic addiction to its own plutocracy. China does not mind: it views the USA as its greatest threat, and is quite happy to help in its deindustrialization every day.

The carbon tax is a radical way out. France has been mulling going for it alone (it would tax all products according to carbon content, including IMPORTS). “Cap and Trade” (another French idea enacted in the EU with extreme difficulty and adverse effects) is, at this point, just a delaying tactic. (Although it should turn worthy in the fullness of time.)

Silly? Well, France imposed a unilateral tax on air travel to pay for treatment of children for HIV. It was an idea of Chirac. Now 17 countries have adopted this tax, and most of treatment of children with HIV, worldwide, is paid by it.

Free market capitalism is a path to prosperity, but each of the words “free”, “market” and “capitalism” have to be defined by soul and smarts first.

If the USA were serious, the USA would go for a carbon tax. Right now.

PA
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

GDP: GROSS DOMESTIC POLLUTION?

2009-05-29T10:29:00.000-07:00

TOWARDS A BETTER WAY OF EVALUATING ECONOMIC ACTIVITY.

Paul Krugman observes in his blog that:

"For most of the past decade, China’s industrial value-added growth (IVA) –industry output less input costs – has moved broadly in step with movements in electricity consumption. But the relationship’s broken down recently: electricity use is still seeing negative growth, while IVA is growing at a decent positive rate again.

Some China analysts are crying foul: If IVA growth figures are being cooked, surely that means China’s recent GDP data have been overstated too."

Gross Domestic PRODUCT, GDP, has long been debated. Louis XV's surgeon was the first to consider GDP, and he defined it agriculturally. The next generation of "physiocrats" generalized "product" to industry, and Adam Smith went to France to study under them. "Product" was the addition of all the expenditures of all FINAL good and services. If one is ten times more inefficient getting to the same product, one has contributed ten times more to the GDP. GDP: a polluter's dream.

The very concept of GDP is well cooked, in any country, and the recipes vary, from country to country.

At the very least, a notion of EFFICIENT GDP should be introduced: when American cars by the millions hold steady in traffic jams, spewing fumes, they boost U.S. GDP. When comparing health care systems, the one in the USA, with a worse outcome, costs twice, per capita, what the French health care system costs. Still, the contribution to "product" should be the same, or more exactly, the contribution to "product" of the system in the USA, per capita, should be redefined so that it is lower than the French one. The end product of the task should be the production of the task, not the inefficiency polluting the achievement of the task.

I agree that this is not how economists have learned to think, but more as physicists have learn to think, more than two centuries ago (Lagrange, d'Alembert). Grounding all of physics in the concept of energy (and work) allowed to make physics more rigorous, and universal. The idea would be to do the same in economics. Thus economics would switch from the subjectivity of money to the objectivity of work, as defined in physics . That would ground economics with energy, just as physics is (and the lagrangians used in generalized economics would be more general than in physics!).

Only then could we compare exactly the productivity of different economic systems...

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

HIGH SPEED REMINDER

2009-05-23T20:11:00.000-07:00

NEARLY CARBON FREE, AND ALREADY AS FAST AS PLANES...

Articles on High Speed Rail here and there, all over the USA, saying nothing which could not have been said 30 years ago. Many European governments have been aware of this sort of things for so long that thousands of miles of very high speed rail are already built in Europe.

Mr. Florida from "The Atlantic" wrote an article explaining that High Speed Rail would helpt the megacities of the USA (as a good American, he used the occasion to underestimate the French and British GDPs...)

Mr. Florida expects speeds much lower than the ones already deployed in France (320 kmh = 200mph on the TGV Sud Est and TGV Est). Latest High Speed Rail lines in France are built for 250 mph = 400 kilometers an hour(8 kilometers radius curves).In normal operations Siemens Valero has reached 400 kmh (250 mph) in Spain.

Maglev has strictly no advantage on steel wheels. Tests on TGV at 575 kmh (~ 360 mph) have shown that air resistance is the main problem. Steel wheels trains can go anywhere a train can, and that a Maglev cannot do. In France, on many lines TGV go faster than normal trains. Normal trains on the mainlines go at 125 mph (200 kmh). Also Pendolino type TGVs, bank to take turns at higher speed than normal trains on normal lines, are made for intermediate speeds. Russia ordered plenty of those).

A Maglev, being very lightly built, burns and gets destroyed very easily (the experimental Japanese Maglev burned, and a German Maglev crashed, killing 23, and severely injuring 10).

High Speed Rail should not be restricted to the mega regions. The latest AGV is supposed to cruise more economically than the TGV at 225 miles an hour. Cruising speeds of 250mph should be no problem, giving EFFICIENT and CARBON FREE travel for the masses between Los Angeles and New York City in ten hours, faster than a plane when all is included, city center to city center (once going to the airport, security, and crawling on the runways is taken into account).

The carbon efficiency, safety and reliability of High Speed Rail are its biggest advantages. Another advantage is that HSR is high technology, and the USA could learn to make advanced stuff (the Tesla electric roadster is has a carbon fiber body built in France, the AGV uses carbon fiber; TGV brings regenerative braking to the world's highest heights, the speeds are too high for thermal braking.)

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

NO EMOTION, NO REALIZATION.

2009-05-21T23:59:00.000-07:00

NOT ENOUGH CARE, NO HEALTH CARE.

Krugman makes the following diagnostic: "Despite insurers’ appearance of cooperation with President Obama on health care reform, the double-crossing is well under way... The insurers and the drug companies are, in effect, betting that Mr. Obama will be afraid to call them out on their duplicity."
***

Well health care reform in the USA will go nowhere without the motivation of strong emotions.

Nationalizations of health care systems occurred in Europe after W.W.II (except for the German system). That healthy reaction was part of a general revolt against wealth and profiteers. Indeed, a lot of wealthy individuals and corporations had collaborated with Nazism, and Europe was ravaged by an enormous economic crisis, and had lost control of her destiny to the USSR and the USA.

Only desperate measures had allowed the survival of democracy, and it was clear to the Europeans that wealth had not been on the side of democracy. The wealthy were cowering, and were not going to argue. Several countries reintroduced the death penalty, after more than a century without, and executed collaborators, who, generally, had done it for money and power. So pharmaceutical companies and health care profiteers were not going to sound too unpatriotic. (France executed up to 40,000 fascists, and confiscated companies such as Renault that had shown too much enthusiasm working with the Nazis. Nobody was going to argue too loudly that profiteering was great.)

National health care systems, that is health as a basic human right was the result of a revolt.

Afterwards, health, like freedom, and the pursuit of happiness, was part of the constitution. The question then is this: are Americans revolted enough to get their right? Is Barack Obama revolted enough? Do they even know enough to be revolted enough? Or do they want to keep on sending money to the richest people in the world instead?

Health care as a right will not be born from a post modernist, post partisan, haughty balance of nihilism and profiteering. It will not be born from taking seriously much of the present economic organization of the USA. It will be born out of deliberate, wise, and knowledgeable anger.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

QUESTIONING OBAMA'S TWISTS ON CIVILIZATION.

2009-05-16T21:01:00.000-07:00

WAS CHENEY THE TORTURER IN CHIEF?

***

The bottom line on torture is that no State in the Western tradition has advocated torture that we know of. No official of the West ever came forward, and had the impudence and folly to claim that torture was indispensable (Cheney), and had to be covered up (Obama). Until today.

This is not just an embarrassment for civilization, this is a much graver threat against it than bin Laden, and the few pathetic savages that followed him like decerebrated sheep, ever presented. This time the fish of civilization is truly rotting by the head, an ominous fate.

"Torture" comes from "tortura" the Latin for twisting. That was embarrassing, twisting people like wet laundry, so the Middle Ages preferred to call it "the question". Cheney calls it "enhanced interrogation". Question, or interrogate, in an uncomfortable situation. According to the rogue lawyer, Bybee, it's not torture, as long as people are not dying.

Even in the Middle Ages, statements obtained under torture could not be used during judicial inquiry.

In the Middle Ages, statements made under torture had to be confirmed without torture being a threat; it was also widely viewed by judicial and government officials that torture contaminated the plausibility of whatever suspects said, and turned them into victims. For that precise reason, Jehanne d'Arc was not tortured (all the more since the prosecution's case against her was so weak).

By 1600 CE, torture was not taken seriously anymore because police work had become so good, torture was irrelevant. By 1700 CE, torture was unlawful in Britain, and some famous official was relentlessly prosecuted for having suspended once a woman in a painful position during a police inquiry.

Although many Nazi counter terrorist units practiced torture, the Nazi State never came out and claimed torture was good. True the Nazis were doing atrocious things in secret, but when do we know that a State is doing atrocious things in secret? When it changes the conversation, and does not want to show the pictures anymore? Do not forget the Red Cross used to visit Auschwitz, and saw nothing untoward in that concentration camp. What the Red Cross did not know, and what the Nazis had hidden in plain sight behind the concentration camp, was an extermination camp. In the later, millions were exterminated. What do we know about the worldwide CIA Gulag? Well, we know it exists. How many did it kill, how many did it torture?

The moral sink the USA is disappearing into has no bottom. Doctors -American doctors- violating their Hippocratic oath, were in attendance during torture. It was not out of goodness; they were ready to practice tracheotomy during water boarding. It is already known that more than 100 died under torture. But how many is it really? Thousands? Why not? True, a few Nazi doctors practiced torture (Mengele), but the state did not organize it. In the Middle Ages, neither lawyers nor doctors were in attendance during torture: that was below the dignity of their office.

As pointed out in the New York Times today, official Pentagon numbers show that American attacks on civilian with flying robots kill about 2 terrorists for 100 innocent civilians killed. We are in Nazi counter terrorist moral territory here. What is the difference with what the Nazis were doing in Ukraine in 1942? If it turns out, the Nazi terrorist/innocent kill ratios were better.

Robotic bombing from the air is not just a recipe to lose a war, it's a recipe to lose civilization. That the Taliban gets inside houses is no defense. Just leave houses alone. Get a grip on your callousness.

What the brain challenged Cheney showed in his interview with Bob Schieffer on TV is that he may have ordered torture personally, and somehow misled Bush. It is time to apply the law. Both national and international law say that torture is unlawful. The law of the land also say that the president has to implement the law, and defend the Constitution of the USA. If Obama is unwilling to do it, he is breaching the law too.

This thing is bigger than Obama. Or the office of the president of the USA. Roman law forbid the torture of citizens. This is about civilization. If the USA wants to be known as the United Sadists of America, Obama can proceed on his present course. I wish him bad luck.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

TERMINAL PROBLEM, FINAL SOLUTION

2009-05-14T22:44:00.000-07:00

SAVING THE EARTH THROUGH PREEMPTIVE WAR AND NUCLEAR POWER.
***

Paul Krugman, having visited China, concludes that "China cannot continue producing greenhouse emissions at an escalating rate because the planet can’t handle the strain." OK, but China goes on, and so does the USA. The USA gets 71% of its electricity from fossil fuels. China, with supposedly one new coal plant a week, now emits more CO2 than the USA. What to do? Wait for the planet to explode? Is it Munich all over again?
***

The Principle of Precaution requires to consider the very worst case possible, stop, and think carefully about whether it could happen. In the case of climate, the worst case is a runaway eruption of methane. There are enormous quantities of frozen methane, of the order of all other fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas), it seems. If the temperature rises, it will bubble out catastrophically. Its greenhouse power over ten years is well above twenty times that of CO2. So if the eruption starts full on, the worldwide temperatures would jump by at least ten times what they have risen so far.

This has happened before, at least once in the last 50 million years.

Most of the methane is up north, so the disaster may get in full swing one of these summers. It will be impossible to stop. It may happen this summer, or 50 years from now. On our present course, it will happen. It will make the financial crisis look like absolutely nothing whatsoever. An enormous rise in sea level could be around the corner, if the ice shelves disintegrate. Even if methane does not erupt, other long linear thresholds are close by, like when both forests and oceans will become huge carbon sources, instead of huge carbon sinks. The Antarctic ocean has turned into a CO2 emitter already (because it's shaken too much by high winds and storms, like a carbonated beverage!)

To prevent the methane catastrophe, the only solution is to bring the CO2 creation to zero, ASAP. How to do this? Conservation and advanced civil nuclear power. Advanced reactors are extremely efficient, extremely safe, and create little waste, and can be made to burn nuclear waste. But, whereas the Obama administration spends billions to put broadband Internet in rural areas, the research on advanced nuclear reactors is minuscule.

Civil nuclear power would be a factor of peace, because it would give a pretext to inspect, and check that military nuclear power is not being developed (a paradox).

We face the greatest crisis of the biosphere since the extinction of the dinosaurs. As drastic as this. Some will say that I exaggerate. I wish. Therefore it goes without saying that it is the ultimate casus belli. If countries to not limit their CO2 emissions, they will face war. Economic war should be viewed as a better alternative, a mitigating factor to be implemented immediately.

Indeed, the European Union has decided to take separate action in order to achieve reduction of the greenhouse gas emissions (of the order of 20% very soon). This separate action, the so-called “go-it-alone” scenario, consists of, inter alia, the imposition of “border adjustment measures” such as a “Carbon Import Tax” on products imported into Europe.

It would be excellent if the USA joined the EU. Better late than never.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

HOW THE BANKS BECAME THE GOVERNMENT

2009-05-13T23:41:00.001-07:00

In the fractional banking system we have, banks create money and decide who is to be lent this money to, or, in other words, who is going to be rich.

Thus in the fractional banking system, what was long been viewed as the second most important function of government, after war, the control of the currency, has been given to a few private individuals. This is an amazing revolution.

So, either the banks govern (the system we have presently), or we decide that we control the banks. We The People. In other words, in the second case, we impose on banks a fiduciary duty, and tight regulations so they will not be corrupt.
***

Patrice Ayme
(Much more details to be posted soon on: http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/)

P/S: The only remaining control has been that the government controls the reserve requirements, which determine the multiplier, which, in turn, determines how much money banks can make, and lend. Even that role was abdicated by the Bush administration, since multipliers of 50 were allowed.

DESTRUCTION CONFUSION.

2009-05-11T11:53:00.000-07:00

WE BOMB TO WIN, THEREFORE WE LOSE.

Secretary of Defense Gates has got rid of the U.S. Commander in Afghanistan. The replacement of Gen. David McKiernan less than a year after he took over is supposed to mark a major change in military leadership in a worsening war environment.

So bombing civilians to death by the hundreds to free them from this hostile life does not work? Intriguingly, I heard that this general had been critical of the massive use of Flying robots ("Drones")... In which case his firing will not be a good sign. As everybody who has seen the Terminator movies know, flying robots can be defeated by true human freedom fighters...

And another thing I know is that the war will not be won from the air. Actually why should there be a war? For eight years, the USA has attacked Afghans in Afghanistan to achieve what? A much bigger war?

I say: bombing within miles of any house should be forbidden.

Also, flying robots should not be part of any offensive operations, outside of a well defined battlefield. Robots will be of course very effective, as long as they leave civilians safe and sound.

Telling the Afghans what to do, and what to grow should not be an option either. (When Obama goes on a rampage against poppy fields, he is exceeding his powers, and infuriating the Afghans; better to go to the Taliban and persuade them to go legal, and use the money to purchase civilian goods instead of weapons; many countries grow poppies for legal painkilling, and there is a big market out there).

Long term, the only way out is to convene all the Afghan resistance and the government, and hash out a gigantic compromise on a secular basis. Then use NATO just to insure the compromise, including lots of civilian help.

The fact that the present Afghan constitution is Islamist makes it impossible to fight Muslim fundamentalists with a straight face. This was exemplified with Obama's complete confusion about article 137 of the Afghan Constitution, that allows husbands to rape their wives and orders the later to enjoy it. This is straight out of the Islamist code (and partly from the Qur'an). If Obama finds it "abhorrent" (as he said), he finds the Qur'an abhorrent, and he may reconsider having NATO fighting for it against guys who precisely want to implement it.

The war cannot be about little girls going to school, while the Islamist code say otherwise. Better go to the Taliban, and cut a deal with them about this sort of things.

If you want to win a war, you better figure out what you want first. Just killing people, and forcing the survivors to do what you want, as NATO is presently doing in Afghanistan-Pakistan, is not enough. Besides it is highly immoral, and immorality loses wars.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

THINKING IS EXPENSIVE.

2009-05-09T22:19:00.000-07:00

REPORTING IS EXPENSIVE, BUT CORRECT OPINION EVEN MORE SO.

In his article "Suicide Watch" Frank Rich of the NYT thinks that "The real question is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news, whatever the media that prevail?" True, I agree that real journalists are needed, and true, they will have to feed off the Internet, and that means the Internet will have to charge for news. Maybe, to avoid what is called in law and economics, the "tragedy of the commons" a tax will have to be paid by everybody to pay for independent journalism.

But then on the way he can't resist to feel that reporting is expensive (true) "But opinions, however insightful or provocative and whether expressed online or in print or in prime time, are cheap." In other words, according to Rich, thinking is cheap. Well, not so. The distinction between "opinion" and "reporting" is viewed, in some countries with the most advanced critical and philosophical traditions, as illusory. American journalism has also fallen on its own sword. By insisting on this illusion, it lost all critical sense. For years, American journalism has embraced the militaristic and plutocratic propaganda of the oligarchy with unfathomable enthusiasm.

And this still goes on: this week "reporting" on the American bombing of civilians in Western Afghanistan illustrated what is very wrong with American journalism. Namely, the media of the USA followed exactly the story as it came out of the Pentagon, every twist and turn. I am graced with the capability of perfect understanding of some foreign TV reports, and the "reporting" there was very different.

In the end, some times years later, the American public finds they have been lied to again and again, and again and again, it's getting worse and worse. The crimes of Nixon are childish, compared to those of the Bush administration, and the price will be incomparably greater.

This is directly related to the fact American media reported the tiny stuff while having no opinion about the really big conceptions. The mixture of politically correct and plutocratically compatible is proving highly poisonous. As Stalin put it: "Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?" Facts are nothing if not brought forth by the power of opinion. To claim both are independent is to claim that the only opinion that counts is that of the oligarchy. No wonder people are bored by journalists.

No wonder there is a malaise. No wonder it's a suicide watch. If you know only facts, and you can't think, you will know an ominous fate.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

WHAT BANKS OUGHT TO BE FOR.

2009-05-05T21:20:00.000-07:00

BANKING CLARITY A MUST TO REPAIR THE ECONOMY.

Stiglitz and Krugman had dinner with Obama. Krugman said he could not talk about it, because it was "off the record".

What should be on the record is this: the banks have a primary function, a secondary function, and a tertiary function. Absent these three functions, it's as if there are no lungs, and no heart: the corpse of capitalism can't walk.

It is not clear that these two functions that define banking philosophically have been insured as much as they should have during the first four months of the Obama administration, while it was busy pursuing further the financial policies of the Bush administration.

Instead a great deal of attention was given to having the bank holding companies make good the very contracts that put in danger the very ability of the banks to conduct these two basic functions.

The three basic functions that should have been attended to are the following.

The first two are primary, and were probably present in inchoating form in prehistory. They are the sanctity of deposit of capital (which is primary), and the clearing of payments (which I view as secondary, considering that payments clear from account to account, and that cannot happen if the accounts are busted). The financial system does not exist without these two functions.

The ability to extend credit is tertiary. Although the economy can work for a few hours without it, many small companies depend upon credit for going from paycheck to paycheck.

Obama had to insure the three functions above. I am not sure about the third function, credit, because I have not seen authoritative studies (banks have been saying they lend plenty whereas professionals in other industries have been claiming the opposite). But for the first two it was easy: just do like the French republic. And do not let banks go bankrupt (Lehman Brothers, a huge, old and famous bank, was allowed to go chapter 11, destroying confidence in the banking system worldwide, a system that rests on trust).

In France Sarkozy decided that all deposits would be insured, in any amount, in any bank. (This can be done in two ways: either by boosting the insurance fund, the FDIC in the USA, or by preventing any banking failure by having the government step in as soon as a bank threatens to become insolvent, the later route being followed in France, so far.)

Insuring any deposit would provide the country with a lot of confidence. Since the currency system is a myriad of contracts in trust, this is crucial, as fundamental a measure to take for the economy as possible. Relative to this, the waste of toxic "assets" is completely irrelevant, just as irrelevant as it should always have been to banking.

Unfortunately Geithner proposed with his PPIP a plan that compromised some more the FDIC (in truth it looks as if the PPIP would bankrupt the FDIC). Geithner's aim was to save the bank holding companies' upper management, and various elements of the plutocracy connected to them, which he seems to view as the essence of the economy.

Instead, the Obama adminstration should have stuck with the TRUST IN DEPOSITS, the basic function of banking, the one prehistoric man understood, but Geithner apparently does not.

Just an example of the sort of difficulty the refusal of insuring all deposits led to: millions of small businesses may only find challenging to maintain balances below $250,000. This is all the more silly, since the Obama administration made clear it viewed the 19 top banks as too big too fail (thus there was no risk insuring all and any deposits; in a huge contradiction, though, depositors did lose their money in smaller banks going in receivership!)

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Addendum: REPAIRING BANKS: Stiglitz called Geithner's PPIP a "robbery of the American people". I agree (and already said this about TARP, calling it Transferring Assets to Rich Plutocrats, as soon as it appeared). But a week later, Obama repelled the mark to market rule, and that pretty much made the PPIP unworkable. The ways of Obama are not as mysterious as those of God: one week he makes a blatant gift to the hedge funds, delivered by his human poodle, and the hedge funds are all happy that the plutocrats are solidly in control, and the week after, Obama takes away their food, but they are too stupid to notice.

Stiglitz and Krugman opposed the conversion of preferred to common stock. Indeed the preferred route for cleaning the banking system would have been receivership (the bank fails, and is reorganized by the government, and then sold for a profit). The point being that the USA then takes ownership of the bank for the cost of recapitalization. The drawback is that severe disruptions to the financial system can happen as shareholders lose everything and bond holders can lose a lot.

The Obama administration had first followed the Bush administration policy (reimbursing losses with taxpayer money, which I have long argued was unworkable: I valued the losses at 8 trillion, minimum; now the IMF is at three trillions in the USA alone). Thus I was satisfied by the conversion into common stock (which has the right of vote, that preferred do not have). It is as good as nationalization can get, once receivership has been excluded (for the reasons of the disruption that bothered Obama).

The Obama administration had first followed the Bush administration policy (reimbursing losses with taxpayer money, which I have long argued was unworkable: I valued the losses at 8 trillion, minimum; now the IMF is at three trillions in the USA alone). Thus I was satisfied by the conversion into common stock (which has the right of vote, that preferred do not have). It is as good as nationalization can get, once receivership has been excluded (for the reasons of the disruption that bothered Obama).

ENERGY EFFICIENCY HELPS ECONOMY

2009-05-01T00:28:00.000-07:00

INEFFICIENCY IS THE PROBLEM.

I have long claimed that to force the economy to become more efficient would be helpful to the economy. Energy reform, to be implemented, needs the augmentation of economic activity. It is no coincidence that the French economy, with its long term drastic investments in an efficient economy, is doing best among the advanced economies.

Paul Krugman addresses the subject in the New York Times (April 30, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/opinion/01krugman.html).

Here is my comment:

Why not use a different model for the economy of the USA? Suppose it's an obese person. The arteries became so inefficient, that the patient suffered a heart attack. The doctor comes and prescribes to cap calories, and trade the usual foods for others, healthier ones.

What should the patient do? Go along with the prescribed changes, or claim that only hamburgers are satisfying, and a better health means the capacity to consume ever more hamburgers, and to become ever bigger?

France has been under drastic energy taxes for decades, and cap and trade for many years. Nevertheless the French economy seems to be going much better in all ways at this point, perhaps precisely because it is protesting people in the street who push for reforms, and not just a few ideologues paid by the ultra rich (Gingrich style republicans, Limbaugh, neoconservatives, etc.) In other words, it is the demos (people) and not the ultra rich who propose reforms and then dispose of them. The people is always for energy reform, because they are the one breathing the air, and they can't go to Bali to relax for 6 months.

In the Turin area (the hometown of Fiat's Chrysler savior), cranes are everywhere. Two hours away, the French village of Monetier over the border has twice more cranes than the entire city of San Francisco. Real estate is down in France, but just barely (it collapsed in nearby Spain, with its more American economic model, caused by the long reign of fascists, and then neoconservatives, and axed on construction and speculation)

But the European Union, and the French government, are introducing ever more stringent energy conservation measures. The French government just proposed a new high speed automated 24/7 metro for the greater Paris, to extend the existing system (cost: 50 billion dollars). This is all related: there is more money for investments in efficiency, because more money is saved in the direct consummation of energy, and that, in turn, comes from the fact that energy is more expensive, making its use more efficient, and to make energy expensive, the broadest imaginable taxes force everyone to save, and their revenue can be recycled for ever more efficiency.

One would think, at first sight, that the ultra rich would be for energy reform: after all it would bring more riches. But it is not, at least in the USA. In the USA the ultra rich have become vultures feasting on the decaying corpse of an ever more inefficient economy. Hedge funds, in particular, belong to the economy like leeches on a movie star. Enough leeches to hollow the patient out. Financial piracy is part of the inefficiency problem, it has even become its soul, and that's how it feeds, in the USA (and imitation poodles such as London).

In France, and increasingly the rest of Europe, and beyond, the culture of the rich and powerful has turned different, as it responded to the ecology of efficiency. In a country where energy is expensive, it is energy efficiency that bring riches, and thus the energy efficient companies that bring the clout, and their interest is to have an ever more efficient economy. So they push for energy reform.

Is it better to have a more efficient economy, that can do what is worthy, or an obese economy with a chronic heart attack, that cannot stand up for worthy causes? Is virtue and health better than sin and decrepitude? Is the people free to chose?

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

NATIONALIZATION, AT LAST!

2009-04-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

AND NOW PLEASE FIRE THE INCOMPETENT, AND, OR, CORRUPT MANAGERS.
***

In a belated, but significant philosophical shift, White House and Treasury Department officials now say they can stretch what is left of the $700 billion financial bailout funds further than they had expected a few months ago, simply by converting the government’s existing loans to the nation’s 19 biggest banks into common stock.

I advocated this approach an eternity ago, last September: http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/to-get-leverage-nationalize/

I am happy to see that rationality is at last reaching the White House, the Summers of our discontent.

By the way, all and any of the opponents of this nationalizing approach use arguments which can, each, one by one, be completely destroyed. I literally do not know ONE argument of the opponents of nationalization that is valid in any sense. In particular the difference between "public" and 'private" is laughable. The whole problem was precisely that the later owned the former, a contradiction of the republican constitution ("We The People...")

The financial disaster was set up by what has been dubbed "Government Sachs", the reigning plutocracy. By definition the private sector, at that point, had become the government. It sucked up all the money, or nearly so, to itself. Then it proceeded to lose most of it. Then it turned to the taxpayers, and the public, and ordered them to fork over more money, and be deprived of basic services, or else... This is of course intolerable, and it's high time that those of these crooks that deserve to go to jail join Madoff in the slammer.

Now the taxpayers and the public will be more willing to work to reestablish the riches, since they are becoming the owners. They will work even better that way, and for themselves. Capitalism, the free market, work for riches at its best. Oh, by the wy, let's not forget to put honest, capable, transparent managers at the top of the nationalized institutions. We want the best. Off with the old plutocracy!
***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com

FIRST THINGS FIRST.

2009-04-08T14:05:00.000-07:00

TAX GASOLINE MORE, NOW. IT WILL HELP JOBS AND THE ECONOMY.
***
(Published by NYT, April 7, an extremely extended version will be published shortly on wordpress.)
***

The Obama administration seems obsessed by Carbon Tax and Trade, a European trick to encourage industry to modernize and become more efficient, after, and only after the first order effect, high taxes on energy, did most of the work.

The administration's approach reminds one of a chimp putting a tuxedo on, in the hope that would help him to type intelligently. Instead, the administration should keep things simple, if it is really sincere about implementing change.

A gasoline tax is not subtle, it is nothing difficult to implement. A gasoline tax would support a rejuvenated Detroit. Indeed people would be forced, and could be incited to buy new cars (that could be done right away, as I advocated, and as the Obama administration has enjoined Chrysler to do; an alliance between GM and Renault, and Ford with Peugeot and/or Volkswagen could do the same). The country, overall, and quickly would save energy, a national defense function (and advance its technology and base thereof, another defense function).

A national gasoline (and more generally energy) tax would also decrease the enormous deficits that are piling up as the USA tries to spend a huge amount of energy (hence money) trying to get out of its desperately erroneous trajectory. That is another natioanl defense function.

But, unfortunately, the Bush, sorry, Obama, economic advisers are deeply entranced in Market Mystique, as Paul Krugman puts it cogently. So they are delighted to set up another market, the Carbon Cap Trade. It took years for the French and other Europeans to make it work, sort of (the carbon exchange is based in Paris). So Carbon Cap and Trade will allow to delay treatment of the national carbon disease by years. It was also highly profitable to a chemical company such as the French Rhodia, and other giant corporations. One of the problem is that the carbon pollution prices had been mispriced (and given to companies too generously).

Of course it would be unimaginable that Carbon Cap Trade would allow some of the friends of the administration, the hedge fundists, to make more money, and it would be unimaginable that the reason that some in the administration want to set it up is that, precisely, it will take years to do so, while making it looks as if they were busy doing something.

If the executive could execute, rising energy taxes could be done by executive order. Compensatory payments could be made to the poor as in Europe.

Another even greater pie in the sky is "Carbon Capture", also pushed by the administration. This has been done in a few places, true. But mostly for economic reasons (typically reinjecting CO2 to push natural gas out). Otherwise it would turn out so expensive that it would make coal too expensive. But coal produces more than half of U.S. electricity.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

TURK SAYS ISLAM NO IDEOLOGY.

2009-04-05T22:23:00.000-07:00

(In an interview to Roger Cohen, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey claimed that "Islam is a religion, not and ideology". I comment)
***

Islam is just one of the heresies of Judaism, Christianism being the other one. Judeo-Christo-Islamism is an extremely violent religion when compared to Buddhism or Confucianism and other Eastern religions.

Islam, as described in the Qur'an is not just a religion, but a legal system. This is the same with Judaism or Catholicism (the initial form of state Christianism). But the difference is that the later two spread in the Roman empire, where a secular law was already fully deployed. Ultimately even the fanatical Catholic butcher-emperor, Justinian, had to admit that Christian law had to be separated from secular law formally (Justinian killed millions of non Catholic Christians, and devastated entire regions of the Roman empire). In the empire of the Franks, Catholic law was nowhere in sight.

What to do with Islam has long been a serious political problem. Around 1300 CE, interpreting the Qur'an "literally" was repressed, and its great advocate, Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyyah (1263 - 1328) was put in jail, deprived of ink and paper, and died there. His ideas were resurrected centuries later in Arabia, and more recently, became the official religion of Saudi Arabia, and he is now the great hero of today's Islamist fundamentalists.

It is funny that Erdogan claims that Islam is not a discourse of ideas (ideo-logy). Maybe he should read the Qur'an. Not all these ideas in the Qur'an are bad, far from it, some are even excellent, and they assuredly have some logic to them.

So maybe he wanted to imply that he would treat Islam as a religion, the way the West treats a religion, separating it from politics. So to accentuate this, he claims that Islam has neither ideas, nor logic, or maybe ideas, but not logic, or logic, but no ideas?

Interesting perspectives...

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
Readers interested by Islam may want to read: http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/god-slay-because-you-believe/.

WHY EUROPE DID NOT OBEY THE USA AT THE G20.

2009-04-04T14:10:00.000-07:00

FULL METAL JACKET, FULL HISTORICAL CONTEXT.
***
(A version of this essay was published by NYT, April 4; an expansion of it will be put on wordpress.)
***

Gail Collins, a well known columnist in the New York Times, April 3, 2009, tries to be funny by being so shallow and offensive to others as to be self deprecating with the deliberate display of one's own low cultural performance, which, in turn, is supposed to show a great sense of humor. George W. Bush was a master of that art, but it is ubiquitous in the USA. It goes hand in hand with racism and cultural obscurantism.

Here she goes: "If nothing else, the president’s trip overseas helped resolve the longstanding question of who can be more irritating, the Republicans or the French. The president’s main mission, after all, was to try to talk the French and Germans into supporting a serious global stimulus plan, and he failed. There were other accomplishments, sure. But even the tiniest seemed to have required a lot of pandering."

The Europeans were not born yesterday. As I said many times on my sites and various comments to the blogosphere and the New York Times, there is no evidence that the stimulus of the USA is larger than France's or the EU's. Obama's stimulus has in it the AMT (an irrelevant tax relief, which is voted every year), partial compensation for the collapsing state budgets, and desperate attempts to provide for two years or so a small fraction of the social help the EU has mandated into law on a permanent basis. The EU total stimulus is above half a trillion dollars, and the real stimulus of the USA is certainly much less than that. So enough. Obama went to Europe to beg, but as long as it is to make war and pay his ultra rich friends, he will not get charity.

The Europeans know that the Bush-Obama administration is sending trillions of US Dollars to the corrupt giant banks/hedge funds/private equity vulture machine, the plutocracy the guys in his administration (Summers, Geithner, Emanuel) belong to, as low level soldiers.

Bretton-Woods insure that the US Dollar is the world's reserve currency. Other countries, such as China, by buying US Treasury bonds, feed the USA, and pay for its wars, and also pay for its pseudo stimulus, and pay for its plutocracy. Obama went to France and Germany to ask them to pay for the plutocracy of the USA, as if they were China and Japan. And the answer is Nein.

The game is over as far as Europe is concerned. The question is to know what China will do.

Some in the USA will say it's unjust, that the USA insured Pax Americana, saved Europe, etc. This is, very unfortunately, propaganda. It is the apparent truth, as all good propaganda is. But it is not what really happened. The truth is stunning, and basically just the opposite. If some masterminds set fire to your house in the dark, and then recruit some youth to help you out extinguishing the flames in broad day light, what do you call them? How should you view them? This was Wall Street, various American plutocrats and the government they own, did, throughout the twentieth century.

My thesis, exposed in depth on my sites, is that the plutocracy of the USA was the fundamental enzyme of Bellum Americanum, the enormous wars that wrecked Europe from 1914 to 1945. The USA played a very nasty, treacherous role against Europe during the entire century.

Far from supporting democracy, American plutocrats undermined it very carefully. The plutocrats supported Hitler, crucially, and then gave half of Europe to Stalin. Not satisfied with this, the same sort of double game was played in the Middle East (supporting and exciting Iranian Shiites, Hussein and bin Laden, and then switching on them, and decrying them as evil). Well, enough! These truths, however paradoxical they are, will get to be known, and, as they are, the clout of the USA will sink even faster than its industry.

Other countries have known terrible government and horrendous periods in history. The way out is first by shedding a light, so that knowledge can flow in.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

CORSAIR CAPITALISM KILLS.

2009-04-01T23:05:00.000-07:00

France and Britain, several centuries ago, supported corsairs, who were state sanctioned pirates (preying on Spanish shipping, typically). Some became very famous and honored (Sir Francis Drake in Britain, Surcouf and Suffren in France). The USA has been using its plutocrats and hedge funds as old time corsairs, but on a world sucking scale. Nazism was a client of Wall Street and varied American plutocrats. Stalin, Hussein and bin Laden were allies, and received gifts [such as half of Europe for Stalin]. Enough.

Plain old thievery and organized crime is at the root of the present crisis. Unfortunately, the inexperienced, plutocratically advised Obama, chose as economic advisers devoted fanatics of the plutocracy, Summers and Geithner, and their perverse and ridiculous advice is often regurgitated by the august presidential lips, just as it was put in. G20 leaders should be aware of that.

Present American policy, with its trick to force other countries [such as China] to buy Treasury Bonds of the USA, lest the world economy collapses, forces the rest of the planet to support American military adventures.

For nearly a century, the American oligarchy has taken ethical short cuts to enrich itself at the expense of everyone else. Under the cover of "DEREGULATION", that very small minority, mostly based in the USA physically and philosophically, has set up special "industries" to steal as much as it could from commoners [American for-profit health care is an example, it kills dozens of thousands of Americans every year; even putting people in jail has been made into a for-profit industry, so has been credit ratings]. This small minority of "the best and the brightest" has stolen so much of the world capital, that not enough has been left for the rest of the world economy to function. As simple as that.

It is time for serious intellectual leadership for this planet. It will not come from a country that is unable to rise its energy taxes [the only highly effective proximal measure to reduce CO2 emissions.]

The color of the face may have changed, but not the color of money.

[Full post on that subject on the site below.]

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

THE USA IS A PLUTOCRACY, NOT JUST AN OLIGARCHY.

2009-03-31T11:49:00.000-07:00

JAPAN'S DIFFICULTIES VERSUS COLLAPSE OF THE USA:

Let me quote from Paul Krugman blog, as part of this interesting biofeedback we are engaged in. Krugman extensively quotes Adam Posen, "who really really knows what went down during Japan’s lost decade:

"What the Obama team is proposing is disconcertingly similar to the actions of Japanese Prime Ministers Hashimoti, Obuchi, and Mori in 1995 and 1998: Rather than ask the legislature for straightforward recapitalization money, you have the political leadership preferring to risk overpaying current owners of toxic assets rather than forcing sales. For all of Japan’s supposed intervention in markets, its government still lacked the stomach for taking over banks, let alone closing them."

And Krugman to add: "To be fair: the Obama team really does face huge political obstacles in doing the right thing. Maybe it really can’t be done; as Rahm Emanuel said about me, “[unprintable].”"

Krugman concludes: "But we shouldn’t kid ourselves. Japan is us."

OK, let me add now my grain of salt. President Obama himself has evoked Japan's "Lost Decade", to justify nothing drastic, like firing the influence peddlers and financial scam artists in tight orbit around him. As I pointed out before, though, and as Krugman reminds us, it is politically dangerous for Obama to do the right thing before he has done the wrong thing, and shown the average US citizen that he got it all wrong, in nearly all ways.

In Japan real GDP per person went up during the "lost decade". In the USA, real GDP per person has been going down for a full decade prior to the economy tipping out of control in the last six months. That why I call this slump made in the USA, a depression, not a recession.

So "Japan is us" is too rosy a scenario. Japan has a distinct oligarchy, but it did not fall into outright plutocracy since W.W.II. Financial rewards at the top have been kept reasonable, all along. Japan remembered that its oligarchy led it to disaster by attacking China, South East Asia, and then the USA, during W.W.II. Ever since, it has kept tight reins on it.

The French oligarchie (14 century) comes from the Greek oligarkhia "government by the few", from oligoi "few, small, little" and arkhein "to rule". Plutocracy means that it is the wealthy, and the underground, that rules. This is the case in Banana Republics, and, now, in the USA.

Sending trillions of dollars to the corrupt hedge funds-bank holding companies complex, "without keeping track" while millions of US citizens are threatened with foreclosure, and the Obama administration stresses out about a few dozen billions for the car industry, is par for the course.

How does one get rid of a plutocracy when it's firmly in control of the state? Well, revolution. Or then one elects someone one could hope was out of the system: Obama. So, as the Economist wrote it in its latest lead editorial: "lead, damn it".

Instead the young chief of staff, "Three seconds away from the president", got 16 millions in two years from a bank. Among ethical people, we call that a bribe from the bank holding companies, so that, when the guy is chief of staff, trillions can be sent to bank holding companies, while claiming disingenuously that the USA is the only country that ever was, which does not know how to temporarily nationalize banks. As long as this sort of enormity is not fixed, the economy of the USA will not be fixed.

Geithner on ABC news this weekend claimed that he "always worked in public service". Either he deliberately lied, or he has lost track of reality. Many of those guys have such a wrapped notion of reality that, when they work for a "consultancy" such as "Kissinger and Associates", as Geithner did, for years, they envision themselves as in public service.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

REACHING FOR THE HEIGHTS.

2009-03-27T15:29:00.001-07:00

In Chinese philosophy blossomed an explicit appeal to the splendor of the mountains and the discipline of the climbs. Nietzsche used to be a habitual solo climber. Although they were no climbers that we know of, Socrates, Xenophon, Archimedes, Marcus Aurelius, Julianus, Boetius, Descartes, and several French philosophers killed by the Nazis, were men of the sword. Other major philosophers, such as Abelard, Giordano Bruno, or Galileo Galilei, lived a life of combat. There are more: a bit before Bruno, a French philosopher was burned on top of his books.

Why the connection between the fight, the climb, and the philosophers? Why the climbing, why the fighting? Is that wise?

As the ground falls away, the climber enters an ever higher, grander world... What bouldering, and simple common life, does not have as much of, is a massive world falling away, ever smaller and disturbingly insignificant. No need to go into orbit, going up a rock, fighting a good war is plenty enough.

Endurance and persistence are not just human qualities, they are those that any mind needs as it rises to the highest occasions...

And thus, since ever, the Lords of the Heights of Thought have looked favorably up the mountains and down the valleys...

It is to us to give a sense to the cosmos, and it may as well be grand.

Patrice Ayme

(P/S: This no endorsement of the so far somewhat harebrained US war in Afghanistan/Pakistan; as I said many times, a good trick to divide the Taliban and the tribes would be to make licit some of the poppy cultivation; to deal with Pakistan a serious effort of nuclear disarmament is urgent, lest we want to risk a massive nuclear war.)

WHY HEDGE FUNDS SHOULD BE CUT DOWN TO SIZE.

2009-03-25T21:53:00.000-07:00

ERRONEOUSLY FUNDED ECONOMIC THEORY HAS ALLOWED VULTURES TO GROW BIGGER THAN CARRION.
***

Hedge funds and traders of exotic financial products could be under stricter governmental supervision, U.S. officials say. And to give a list of obvious measures, such as registering with the SEC, etc.

Besides the obvious propositions of the Obama administration, the following should be done:

The mathematics of the entire derivative market should be changed so that it can attenuate perturbations to the system, instead of augmenting them as it does nowadays.

In particular non commercial operators should see their leverage severely restricted.

Trading limits should be put on anything that is traded, to provide a speed limit similar to the speed of light in physics. This way information could reach all market participants equally and not just the first responders and professional manipulators. [Modern technology would allow to do this is in a fair and efficient manner.]

Another way to limit speculation would be a tiny tax on any transaction.

The rights of CEOs to sit on each other's boards should be limited. Not doing this creates a CEO class, a subset of the plutocracy. [Maybe union representatives should be sitting on the board, as in Germany]

Countries should be required to pay their way. In particular the USA, should raise taxes on consumption of good and energy to become self sufficient financially, instead of having dubious feudal arrangements with non democracies to pay tribute (an allusion to China). This is no good for all parties involved, and condemns democracy, for all parties involved.

Legend has it that hedge funds and private equity using tremendous leverage provide "liquidity". Whatever that is. what we see in this crisis is that they provide inextinguishable debt.

In general the argument could be made in serious economics that, ultimately money represents energy. If this is true (and it is), money should be finite in amount. The fundamental error that caused the present crisis is not to have believed that this was so.

Thus, as the highly leveraged hedge funds and private equity grow, they take energy OUT OF the rest of the economy. Hence their leverage should be seriously constrained, and made to vary according to the public utility of what they invest in (For example, more leverage for green energy investments).

More details and justifications are found in: "Reforming World Finance", November 28, 2008, http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2008/11/

Patrice Ayme
patriceayme.wordpress.com

ONLY IN THE USA

2009-03-23T14:21:00.000-07:00

CHANGE THEY CAN CASH IN:
***

Part of the comment below is critical of the Geithner plan, and of Summers. It was censored by the New York Times. The next day, unsullied by this sort of nastiness, the market rallied 7%. I am happy that the market rallied, but the fact remains that the plan is both incredibly unfair, and, even worse, cannot work, in the long run: one pail of water will not this fire extinguish.
***

Bush was financially bad. Bush poured gasoline on the financial crisis. For example he allowed (in 2004) banks to go to a leverage of 40. In July 2007, Bush removed the no selling short on a down tick rule (after that the hedge funds were free to bear raid the entire market).

But Bush did not start the fire. The guy who started the fire is the guy who refused to regulate the Credit Default Swaps in 1998, screaming after the lady heading the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to prevent her to regulate, as she wanted. This is exactly why AIG had no provisions to cover its extravagant betting with the Credit Default Swaps. In 1999 that same incompetent character abrogated the Banking Act of 1933 (that maintained a distinction between banks and investing on Wall Street, among other things). That guy who started the fire was Summers, his assistant was Geithner.

Summers and Geithner should not be giving orders to society and advice to the president. They should be prosecuted under RICO. They are the origin of the fire, and Obama should learn to distinguish between arsonists and firemen.

Instead, the administration finally came up with its plan to restart the banking system. It consists into lending one trillion dollars of taxpayer money to the class of people who caused the problem to start with.
***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
***

Addendum (Not sent to NYT): In exchange for a trillion dollars of public money, the private investors are supposed to contribute thirty billion dollars of private money to the party. Thus the government of the USA will create, with public money, the largest hedge fund ever, with a leverage of 33. That privately managed hedge fund will entice the banks to surrender their “toxic assets”. Between friends, many tender things may happen. "Toxic assets" could be massively overvalued, for example, since they are paid with public money, using tremendous leverage.

After, and if, the private investors have grabbed the “toxic assets”, they will enjoy the income stream coming from them (since many of these “toxic assets” are made of mortgages glued up and all mixed together they bring the cash flow of these mortgages). If they unload and walk away after enjoying that income flow, it’s no problem, no problem for them, because the trillion dollars loan is “non recourse”, which means that the borrower can call it quits whenever so desired, without any consequences whatsoever.

Will one trillion do the trick? No. The bank holding companies' losses are at least 5trillions (say Goldman and PIMCO), and maybe as much as twenty trillions (say others). So what is the solution? Nationalizations (there are many ways to do them). Hedge funds do not like those. But they like trillions of public money to call their own. Is there trick to try before nationalizations? Yes, I have one, and it goes through the G20.

WHEN PROGRESSIVISM KILLS THE FREE MARKET.

2009-03-21T07:45:00.000-07:00

THE SAD STORY OF THE PERSECUTED LORDS OF FINANCE.

Why is everybody complaining about the American financial system? Is it because it is not enough of a free market anymore? In the past American financiers could buy and sell people. That was really free and easy going. George Washington, an astute investor, owned three hundred people when he died. He obstinately refused to free them, in spite of his friend Lafayette's entreaties. That was American character at its best. It's not because you have a French friend, and four-fifths of your army was French, and 90% of your ammunition was French, and all your navy was French, that you should make your civilizational practices French too. That would be like, well, slavery. Now Washington is dead, but his spirit lives in the capital named after him. To the extent pesky French progressivism has allowed it to. But it has been a rough ride.

OK, slavery was rough, too. Now, though, there is a huge improvement, it's more like serfdom. American people work hard, and then send all their money to their American Lords of Finance. So why are people complaining so much? The Lords of Finance are the best and the brightest, remember?

Let good Americans look up to Warren Buffet, an owner of one of these two or three (American) credit rating agencies that rule the world. These agencies allowed other plutocrats to build the worldwide pyramid, that Ponzi scheme of stealing the savers' money, and giving it all to the wealthiest of the rich, the hedge funds and private equity. The credit rating agencies gave them the respectability necessary to do so, just as Mr. Buffet, with his grandfatherly looks, personally gives respectability to the lure of the plutocrat. So does the crocodile look like an old tree trunk, and drifts reassuringly down the lazy river. Interview the plutocrat, or the oligarch, and he will gush respectably about sports and the home team, showing that this is all what this simple man cares about. it's not about ripping you off, and drinking all your money, or your blood, heavens forbid. Just if you can't pay for health care, why should you get it? Is it not a free market? Pay as you go? Don't pay, well, just don't go and die. Mr. Buffet, the friend of Obama (they both said), has made a fortune in health care. If slavery was around, no doubt Mr. Buffet would make a fortune in slavery. But, sadly, slavery is no more. Thank God for hedge funds, though: they make slavery without chains possible at last...

Interest rates on credit of the order of 30%, high enough to justify execution of the lenders in some jurisdictions in the Middle Ages, are a reality of contemporary American life. So just let all good Americans look at the positive side, watch sports on TV, get totally critical and knowledgeable about their silly sport teams, and manage their anger like good little sheep. Let the French get all worked up about human rights, and demonstrate in their stead. The French are obviously antibusiness: when the French proclaimed the Universal Rights of Man, and outlawed slavery worldwide, they interfered with American business. 75 years later the free market in human beings was abrogated in the USA, causing huge losses for American business (the economy of the American South had been growing tremendously, thanks to the fast growing use of slaves in industry; the civil war, and the abrogation of slavery destroyed that). One trembles to imagine what new antibusiness measures Europe intends to torture the American Lords of Finance with.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

BLAME THE VICTIMS, IT FEELS GOOD.

2009-03-17T10:54:00.000-07:00

US NOBEL LAUREATE KRUGMAN SUGGESTS TO DISSOLVE THE EUROPEAN UNION AND THE EURO TO SOLVE THE AMERICAN CRISIS.
***

Paul Krugman in its main New York Times editorial, insinuated that: "Does all this mean that Europe was wrong to let itself become so tightly integrated? Does it mean, in particular, that the creation of the Euro was a mistake?" That was after suggesting the EU did not answer the crisis appropriately because it, well, did not have enough of a political union. This below was my rebuke, and the New York Times posted it right away (thanks!)
***

It is a contradiction to bemoan, as Krugman does, that Europe is both not "unitary" enough, and then to claim that national interest rates in each European country should be freed to jump all around to serve the natives. When the later used to happen, dear professor Krugman, national unemployment rates and currencies also used to jump around, with wild speculative bubbles and busts. With a few wars thrown in. Why don't we do the same in the USA, and the Dollar, and dissolve them too? Last time this was tried, the Civil War made more than one million casualties (~ 3% of the population).

The mishandling of the present crisis, if any, simply shows that Europe has to be integrated more. Europe, and the Euro, were built for more fundamental reasons than satisfying local potentates (because when local elites can play with interest rates and currencies, that augments their local potentia (the Latin word for power, from which "potentate" derives).

That Spain and others will have somewhat difficult years ahead, sure. But Spain, Greece and Portugal are doing better now than they did under the fascist regimes, inspired by the USA, that the European Union kicked out (democracy is a precondition for entry in the EU). Spain had an enormous boom for decades, and now, well, a readjustment is called for. No big deal. Hopefully it will correspond to an economic switch out of tourism and construction. The Spanish government is keen to clean up the coast from too much concrete. So there is some deconstruction to do...

As I will argue more thoroughly on "patriceayme.wordpress.com", the French stimulus is not less than the Obama true stimulus, and kicked in early (2008). True the German government has been slow and self contradictory, but it's a coalition government and several elections are coming within months. Elements of that government are running against each other!

Now Germany mostly agree with France on everything, which is all what truly matters to find European solutions to European crises.

Both Germany and France want to regulate financial markets heavily. The USA wants to talk about something else, like Europe having a bad hair day. Why? Because New York and London profited enormously from their giant Ponzi scheme, and both cities, and the elites of the countries they have enriched with it, would like to refurbish it. Well, it will not happen.

The crisis in Europe should not be overestimated: some banks failed spectacularly, but many giant French banks had multi billion dollars profits in 2008, and real estate in Lyon is still peaking. Although governments are heavily in debt, the French deficit this year is expected to be 5.5%. The one in the USA is expected to be 12%. But the overall debt of individuals in Europe is much lower than in the USA. And ultimately, that is the most important factor: Europe does not depend upon savings from other countries (as the USA does).

The greatest danger to Europe would be an attack against the European construction. It will not happen, but countries in Eastern Europe will have to learn that their boss is not in Washington. I would not call that a crisis. I would call that a solution. And getting to know the truth of history. It is not France and Britain that gave Eastern Europe to Stalin. It is Washington.

Tyranosopher
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
patriceayme.com

P/S: A more detailled comment along the same veins will be posted on "patriceaymewordpress". It will explain why Europe did MORE, not less, than the USA, and why Amreican screaming against Europe is just self serving propaganda orchestrated by the greedy elite that feasts on the entire world population.

PLUTOCRATIC PROPAGANDA EXHIBITED

2009-03-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

KNEEL AT THE FEET OF PRIVATE EQUITY AND HEDGE FUNDS, YOU LITTLE PEOPLE!

To enforce its perverse and self serving way of thinking, the plutocracy of the USA uses opinion makers who teach TRUE THINK. Thomas Friedman is one of these notorious servants of the wealthy. He pushed for the invasion of Iraq as much as he could, but he is not done yet. According to these supporters of wealth, most of the population of the USA is good if it serves the wealthiest of the Rich. By law, the present day USA is organized according to this credo: the richest pay a maximum of 15% tax when they invest in "hedge funds" and "private equity" structured investment vehicles reserved to them (by law again: in the USA law is by the Rich, for the Rich). The laws passed during the Great Depression against money making ever more money were repealed by the happy crew of Rubin-Summers-Geithner-Greenspan (with various "republicans" helping).

Some, of course, will say that I exaggerate, that I am biased, hard to take seriously. So here is Mr. Friedman, March 10, 2009, in the New York Times, faithfully mouthing the line of the Bush-Obama administration. Please read him:

"As for President Obama, I like his coolness under fire, yet sometimes it feels as if he is deliberately keeping his distance from the banking crisis ... This will likely require some degree of government subsidy to PRIVATE EQUITY GROUPS and HEDGE FUNDS to get them to make the first bids for these toxic assets by GUARANTEEING THEY WILL NOT LOSE. This could make great policy sense, but be a nightmare to sell politically. It will strike many as another unfair giveaway to Wall Street.

Unfortunately, the president may have to look the American people in the eye and explain that “FAIRNESS IS NOT ON THE MENU ANYMORE.” All that’s on the menu now is whether or not we avoid a system meltdown — and this will require rewarding some new investors."

To this obscenity, I replied with the following (published as a comment to Friedman by the NYT, the same day):

Hedge funds and private equity are not the solution, they are the problem. The world economy is presently been destroyed because Summers and Geithner want to save those. No, they will not tell you this, and they will not look you in the eye.

Nationalizing the giant insolvent banks ought to mean that they would be separated from their bank holding companies, the hedge funds, the private equity, the CDS, the SIVs, etc. All deposits should be insured, whatever the amount (as in France). The nationalized banks would then be very profitable businesses, and plenty of buyers would show up (if nothing else, giant profitable banks from overseas). Then the USA as a State could sell them (at one time, or progressively). There are thousands of profitable banks in the USA with competent managements that would be delighted to take over pieces of Citigroup, B of A, JP Morgan... The four largest insolvent banks control now two-third of USA banking.

What to do with the craziest derivatives that presently sinking the banks? Just declare them null and void, because they were not lawful to start with. If this can be done on worldwide basis in London in April at the G20 summit. Problem solved. Who is in the way? Those who created the problem to start with, Geithner, Summers and company, 11 years ago.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

CATASTROPHICALLY CRUISING TO OBLIVION.

2009-03-09T13:03:00.000-07:00

On March 09, 2009, Paul Krugman wrote an editorial in the New York Times, "Behind The Curve". I agree wholeheartedly with what he wrote, and complemented it with the following comment that the New York Times was kind enough to publish:
***

The fierce recession of 1982 was the consequence of extremely high interest rates deliberately inflicted by Fed Chief Paul Volcker to break the back of inflation. The short term interest rates were brought as high as 23%. The recession of 1982 was an act of will.

This recession is different. It is structural, the result of an erroneous philosophy of civilization. Its causes are much deeper than those of the depression of the 1930s (which was just a big bust after a big boom, politically mismanaged, spiked with a trade war for good measure).

The present recession follows from decades of misallocations of economic efforts, the decision by Clinton-Rubin-Summers-Geithner-Greenspan to found the economy on hedge funds and private equity, and the total disdain for an energy efficient economy in the same direction as Europe. The median salary has been going down for 11 years, which means that this depression has seen already 11 summers.

By unit of GDP, the USA emits more than three times as much CO2 than France: as Rubin and Summers and Geithner were building giant monopolistic banks full of themselves and their friends, the real infrastructure was left to die. Meanwhile the countries of the EU forced energy prices way high inside Europe to force their economies to become ever more energy efficient. When the world economic boom brought energy prices too high, weakened by years of useless, Orwellian war, the completely inefficient USA broke down.

Obama is facing an utter catastrophe. But, in a NYT interview on March 6, he informs us that he uses television to watch basketball. I guess it's more lively than the utter destruction out there.

Then Obama goes to see Summers, who orchestrated the Credit Default Swaps in 1998. Summers has got to be happy: everyday that goes by, more taxpayer money is sent to the counterparts of the few giant institutions who lent all the money to the hedge funds, private equity, etc. So the wealthy people Summers love are getting relatively richer everyday (while, and because most of the People become poorer). Tomorrow the world will be theirs even more than it was yesterday: the dream goes on.

These are not ranting charges; Obama did not reinstate various short sale rules put in to stop the Great Depression of the 1930s, so his friends in the hedge funds make a killing destroying the stock market investments that constitute most of the retirements dozen of millions of US citizens have. The same friendly hedge fund managers enjoy their maximum 15% tax rate. Indeed, as Obama insists, he is "not socialist". is there an adjective for "hedge-fundist"?

Obama is facing catastrophe, but he does not look at the right indicators, or he cannot read them: the unemployment rate is a NON LINEAR curve. One can just look at it, and sees this: it's clearly a quadratic curve, or an exponential.

Obama does not understand what this means: he knows basketball and law. The exponential function has not been taught to him. He has proably never met a differential equation in his life. This non linear graph, which is totally obvious, means that the catastrophe is feeding on itself, its rate of increase is proportional to how big it already is. The real unemployment rate is already 17% (and even though. most people in the USA need some sort of employment to get health care, so people will accept whatever job in the USA, differently from, say, France, where they get health care, no matter what).

At the present rate of augmentation, by September, the unemployment rate should be above 13% (it's 8.1% now, higher than France). The speed, and self feeding of the disaster is such that, by September, Obama maybe facing 25% real unemployment, or more (the USA jumped in a month from 14% to 17% in real unemployment, and from 7% to 8.1% in the short term unemployment measure, U-3).

Interestingly the real stimulus in the USA is arguably of the same relative size as the French stimulus (although France just entered recession, and although France has mandated, very strong automatic economic stabilizers that kick in when the economy goes down, because of huge spending on social services).

There are many things that Obama could have put in a real trillion dollars stimulus: rail is an example. Light and high speed: there is a huge need for both in their electric version(very efficient; rail could save the car companies). Another huge need is to go to a closed nuclear cycle (like France, and now Japan, the UK, Germany). It's not a question of liking nuclear or not; the open nuclear cycle now used in the USA is an ecological monstrosity, and an enormous waste.

Soon Obama will have sent all the money to his hedge funds friends, and there will be no more money, and then what?

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

(I just wrote on my site an essay on a new method to better avoid catastrophes, that rolls over Descartes' "Cartesian method". Obama would be well inspired to follow it!)
— Patrice Ayme, Hautes Alpes

RecommendedRecommended by 66 Readers

WHY THE BIG DITHER.

2009-03-06T09:05:00.000-08:00

WHEN FRIENDSHIP TRUMPS WORLD PEACE.

The following was posted in New York Times, March 6, 2009. It is my comment on Krugman's "The Big Dither", his editorial in the NYT the same day. To understand my post, it is important to quote Krugman extensively: "When it comes to dealing with banks, the Obama administration is dithering. And the result could be an economy that sputters along for a very long time... Last month, in his big speech to Congress, President Obama argued for bold steps to fix America’s dysfunctional banks. “While the cost of action will be great,” he declared, “I can assure you that the cost of inaction will be far greater, for it could result in an economy that sputters along for not months or years, but perhaps a decade.”

Many analysts agree. But among people I talk to there’s a growing sense of frustration, even panic, over Mr. Obama’s failure to match his words with deeds. The reality is that when it comes to dealing with the banks, the Obama administration is dithering. Policy is stuck in a holding pattern.

Here’s how the pattern works: first, administration officials, usually speaking off the record, float a plan for rescuing the banks in the press. This trial balloon is quickly shot down by informed commentators.

Then, a few weeks later, the administration floats a new plan. This plan is, however, just a thinly disguised version of the previous plan, a fact quickly realized by all concerned. And the cycle starts again." Krugman then hits the nail: "Why do officials keep offering plans that nobody else finds credible?" Well, here is my answer. It's highly unpleasant, but sometimes, so is reality.

***

Where does the tremendous leverage of hedge funds come from? Very simple, from the bank holding companies. AIG also provided coverage for Summers' "Credit Default Swaps", with very insufficient provisions, in other words, tremendous leverage.

Now, at some point the total "value" of derivatives was above 600 trillion dollars (yes, 600,000 billion dollars). Is this what Bernanke, Summers and Geithner and company want to recover with taxpayer's money? Why? Because their friends would be sad otherwise? They could not buy islands (like Paulson) or jet planes? Summers and his cohort are destroying the economy of the USA, and that of the world, and risking a third world war because their friends are unwilling to relinquishing their dishonestly earned powers?

The fundamental civilizing mission of a bank is to save people money, and, using it, provide credit. Doing so it creates money (because it lends ten times more than its capital). All these activities that Bernanke, Summers and Geithner are trying to save have nothing to do with the civilizing, fiduciary mission of a bank.

All this for what, fundamentally constituted unregulated, across state lines betting with the public's money? And which is turning now, under our unbelieving eyes, as the greatest transfer of riches from the public to the wealthiest in the history of mankind? This is the greatest heist that ever was, and all Obama can say to justify it is that the USA has "different cultures and traditions". Yes, like what? Slavery and stealing all the land of the Native Americans, so we may as well keep on keeping on? Except now the mighty may as well enslave and plunder nearly everybody?

Obama is so little informed that he suggested, at some point that, in a "month or two" the "troubled assets" will have recovered. What he should have said was "in a decade or two". Well, civilization does not have a decade or two. As Benjamin Netanyahu just said, he became prime minister at 46, "young in age and young in experience", without having been in government before this (although he was US ambassador), and "I would not recommend this to anyone".

What we are facing is tremendous inexperience, and a hubristic inability to face reality. Reality is that the four largest banks in the USA have two-third of the market, and have to be yanked from the derivatives, their bad management, and the plutocracy, and then recapitalized (with the people money, but a few hundred billions of recapitalization would solve the problem completely and definitively). Reality is that the day after his election, Obama went to work at a hedge fund. OK, maybe just hanging out with old friends.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

DESPERATELY FINDING FAULT WITH FRANCE

2009-03-05T11:36:00.000-08:00

THE PLUTOCRACY OF THE USA MANIPULATES THE PEOPLE OF THE USA WITH LIES, BY BRANDISHING FRANCE AS AN OMINOUS FATE.

In an editorial in the New York Times, "One France Is Enough", Roger Cohen opines that: "President Obama, in his restorative counterrevolution, must be careful to steer clear of his French temptation." (March 5, 2009). Indeed he claims that: "Nobody in their right mind would give up the manifold sensual, aesthetic and gastronomic pleasures offered by French savoir-vivre for the unrelenting battlefield of American ambition were it not for one thing: possibility."
Cohen insists: "Americans, at least in their imaginations, have always lived at the new frontier; French frontiers have not shifted much in centuries."

This sort of thinking is rampant in the USA. It is part of a relentless droning by the opinion makers of the USA: France is continually brandished as if she were an ominous fate. (The following was published in the New York Times, electronic edition, March 4, 2009.)
***

To claim that Obama is in danger of turning the USA into France is in direct opposition with the observed facts.

If Obama wanted to do this he would have signed two executive orders on the day he became president:

1) Hedge Fund and Private Equity managers would have been taxed at the maximal tax bracket, instead of the outrageous 15% they enjoy now.

2) Citigroup and Bank of America would have been nationalized, their management fired, and they would have been yanked from their holding companies and the derivatives and hedged funds. They would have been recapitalized, and ordered to extend credit as usual.

Obama did not do any such thing. I hoped he would, but he did not. He did quite the opposite. Actually Obama is clinging to the notion of privacy to the point of ruining the world economy. Baker, Greenspan and Graham, all right wing statesmen, have begged him to nationalize the four giant banks that are blocking the world economy. But Obama clings to his hedge funds managers like a little one to mummy.

The credit system is still frozen, and the world economy is in free fall. Obama is advised by Larry Summers, the greatest advocate of Credit Default Swaps, Credit Default Swaps have destroyed the world financial system. Germans and French want to regulate them. Summers wanted the Credit Default Swaps free, so they were set free, and destroyed the world. Summers did that in 1998, when he was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.

To claim that there is "possibility" in the USA and much less in France is disjoint from the facts. It cultivates anti-French bias. Perhaps companies get created and destroyed in the USA, but so it is in France. Because the USA is bigger, and because of less social legislation, a company such as Wall Mart can grow faster than its French competitor, Carrefour (which is nearly as big, but which allows union membership).

When looking at the history of inventions, art and ideas, France arguably did much more than the USA, even in recent times. Accusations that are too off base, smacks of racism, and the last thing the USA needs right now, is a bigger serving of hubris, while taxing Obama of being French.

Obama is so completely American, it's not even funny. Obama is affected by exaggerated claims of American unicity, a form of nationalism that has blinded the USA in recent decades.

Obama goes around saying that "only in the USA is my story possible". That is literally true, but only in the sense that only in the USA there was so much racism based on skin color, that, a little while ago, he would have been a slave or a janitor, but he is president. But it is not because suddenly the USA is less racist, that the USA has invented antiracism. The Roman empire had Hispanic, Gallic, African, and Arab emperors. Great Britain and France long ago already had Jews leading their governments and/or states (Disraeli, Mac Mahon, Blum). The present French president is the son of a foreigner.

Obama claimed that "the USA invented the Internet" (physicists at CERN in Geneva have a different idea). Obama also claimed that "the USA invented the automobile". As someone who has long known him quipped: "that's why it has a French name". But that is the point entirely: Americans are trained not to think. It has a French name, therefore the USA invented it. This is neo-American logic: I don't think, therefore I am. Saddam killed his own people, as Bush loved to say, therefore I kill Iraqis too. Now Obama sends 17,000 soldiers to kill and get killed in Afghanistan, without a plan, he admits, but Bush wanted to send twice more, so it's "bipartisan": half and half. American logic in wonderland, very neo-American.

In truth the first automobile was by Cugnot, a Frenchman, in 1769, as recognized by everybody, including the British Automobile Association. These first automobiles were steam powered. The internal combustion engine was invented by a Swiss around 1800, and ran on hydrogen (!). A whole slew of European inventors perfected it during the nineteenth century. The first car manufacturers in the world were French: Panhard & Levassor (1889) and Peugeot (1891). But lying about technology make the USA feel good about itself, it creates a sense of national unity. Example of an oft told lie: "the USA invented the transistor (1948)". In truth Germans had invented the first transistors (using Germanium as semi conductor), 15 years earlier.

In general the most fundamental science and technology has been invented in Europe, not in the USA. The USA has not produced thinkers of the caliber of Lamarck, Hugo, Darwin, Nietzsche, Einstein, Poincare', Godel, De Broglie, Dirac, etc. Civilizational class thinking does not blossom in the USA. When one looks at the present USA financial crisis, the greatest heist in the world, and the incapacity of "We The People of the USA" to stop the non sense, while patriotically sending ever more money to those who stole all the money, one is ready to change the meaning of the USA acronym from United States of America into "United Stupid of America".

There again, Obama came up with that very American tendency of making fun at the expense of foreigners. Asked why he did not nationalize the banks, he replied: "Sweden had like five banks", and he laughed. First, of course, it's false, it's a lie meant to create a diversion, sugar coated with a joke: "five banks, ha ha ha". Foreigners living in the USA are often submitted to this sort of demeaning jokes. They happen when American racism is relaxing, and in need of a diversion. In truth, the USA presently has four bank holding companies that are in huge trouble and, together, make two-thirds of the USA market. Thus the USA has four banks, ha ha ha.

The immensely catastrophic socioeconomic system that is devouring the USA needs no encouragement. The usual trick of the US plutocracy is to claim that France is a disaster for creativity, riches, etc. And then to claim that any socioeconomic progress in the USA smacks of France, thus is unpatriotic. In truth, France is richer per capita, has better health care, better high technology in roughly all dimensions, has higher productivity per hour, and so on. What the USA has that France does not have, is the wealthiest class in power, having reduced the middle class to crumbs. To bash foreigners to justify the increasing backwardness of the USA is getting a bit old.

I will try to put more details on my site(s).

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

GLOBAL WARMING VERSUS GLOBAL HEATING.

2009-03-02T20:38:00.000-08:00

"Global warming", "climate change" nice subtleties, too subtle by several orders of magnitude. Nice does not make right. I propose GLOBAL HEATING instead.

I am not confusing warming and heating. Verily, warming is something innocent that happens by the fire, as the gentle flames caress the glowing logs, and one feels cuddly below the nice greenhouse blanket. So far planetary warmth has gone up by less than one degree over the 3,000 year baseline. So it's all very nice. It seems indeed possible that, as some have suggested, anthropogenic Neolithic methane production prevented a fall into a glaciation.

But it is going to change. It's going to be 4 degrees Celsius by 2099. Some models have that by 2050. I personally believe that we are one big methane belching away, from a multi-degree HEATING that could occur within a few years. It will not be nice. Most of the planet would be devastated (See New Scientist of early March 2009).

Semantics matter. Warming is a change, heating a death threat. It's the later we are facing.

Now, of course, as I explained a few years ago, the Equipartition of Energy Theorem says that heating will be roughly only one-third of the problem. Great tragic and dramatic changes will engulf the planet, such as changed currents, droughts, desertification, great storms, sea level rise... Pretty soon only the polar areas will be inhabitable.

Patrice Ayme

CREDIT DEFAULT SUMMERS

2009-03-02T15:43:00.000-08:00

(A version of the following was kindly posted by the New York Times Marc 1, 2009, as one of F. Rich's editorial comments. I appreciate the change with a few years ago, when only the bellicose plutocratic propaganda was allowed to make itself known.)
***

PLUTOCRACY UNCHAINED, AN ONGOING NIGHTMARE:

Larry Summers is Obama's main economic adviser. Larry Summers, as assistant Treasury Secretary under Clinton, came out in 1998 against regulating Credit Default Swaps (CDS). He opposed regulation with extreme violence. Credit Default Swaps are insurance promises against the default of some bond insurer themselves issued in a non regulated way by financial entities. They are traded as if they represented something of value. In truth they have no value whatsoever, because there is no guarantee that those who claim that they would make good on the insurance could do so, since it's all unregulated and they have no provisions (thanks to Jabba the Hut, who did not want them regulated; please excuse the poetry). At some point the total market of CDS was 64 trillions (64,000 billions). As the housing market collapsed, so did the CDS. The banks have got to own trillions of them.

So now we are all chickens in the house, guarded by the fox, Summers and his assistant, Geithner, and the assistant of Geithner, from Goldman-Sachs. The foxes are in charge, and the world economy is exploding, just as a hen house explodes in a frenzy of blood and feathers when the foxes come inside. This is a terrible change, and the collapse of the world economy is unparalleled in its speed and ferocity (even relative to the 1930s). Something has to be done. What has to be done is very simple: the bank basic functions have to be disconnected from the bank holding companies and all the "bad assets", namely mostly those Credit Default Summers. Then the basic banks left by this purification by nationalization could extent enormous credit, and be sold again (simple computation shows that, for less than the money injected in AIG, one could flood the economy with at least four trillion dollars of credit, by purifying Citi and B of A). But they will not do it.

Why do Summers, Rubin and their Geithner want taxpayers to pay for CDS? Well, why not? If they can get away with it, is it not their definition of good?

Meanwhile, armed with the suspension of the short sale rule and 15% tax rates, the friends of the worthy trio above, and their class invested in hedge funds keep on selling short and making huge profits from the drop of the markets and the 401ks. Hedge funds are a form of investment exclusively for the richest, by law, the law of the land, the law of the rich, of course.

No detailed description was made on who profited from what exactly as hundreds of billions of taxpayers dollars was distributed to the world's richest people. Obama seems to have little understanding of the entire subject. He repeats Summers' talking points (example: 'Sweden is a small country, hahaha"). To save the world economy there is no time, and RICO, The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act should be evoked. It is made for this sort of situation (bankruptcy, fraud, obstruction of justice, etc.) and looks for "patterns of behavior", not specific acts.

Those who let the world economic system crash will end with blood on their hands. Tragic the culpability they will bear.

***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/